Fedora Project Developer Proposes Layered, More Agile Design to Distribution

Karrde712 writes "Fedora Cloud Architect Matthew Miller announced a proposal on a plan to redesign the way that the Fedora Project builds its GNU/Linux distribution. Fedora has often been described as a 'bag of bits,' with thousands of packages and only minimal integration. Miller's proposal for 'Fedora.Next' describes reorganizing the packages and upstream projects that comprise Fedora into a series of 'rings,' each level of which would have its own set of release and packaging requirements. The lowest levels of the distribution may be renamed to 'Fedora Core.' Much discussion is ongoing on the Fedora Devel mailing list. If any Slashdot readers have good advice to add to the discussion, it would be most useful to respond to the ongoing thread there." A full presentation on the plan will be given at the Flock conference next month, and draft slides have been uploaded. A few more details about the discussion are below the fold.

Karrde712 continues, Discussion on the list has questioned whether this is meant to be a return to the old "Fedora Core" and "Fedora Extras" model of Fedora's early life, to which Miller responded: 'I'm aware of this concern — I was there too, you know. As I was talking about the idea with people, it kept being hard to not accidentally say "core". Finally, as I was talking to Seth Vidal, he said, in his characteristic way, "Look, here's the thing. You should just call it Fedora Core. If you don't, people are going to be grumbling in the back corner and saying that it's really Core, and the conversation becomes about a conspiracy about the name. Just call it Fedora Core, and then have the conversation about the important point, which is how it's different."'

Marketing not cutting edge

[Stonefish]

If you're concerned about packaging you're in marketing not software development, why not just spend hours talking about the colour of the box and be done with it. This is one of the reasons why debian is making inroads into the enterprise space. Less colour and more bang. Once many years ago I thought that Debian wasn't for business use and only redhat was a contender in this space and I fought hard to standardize on this supported model. Since then the packaging quality of debian has demonstrated its robustness and redhat has been focusing on other things.

Listen to the sysadmins

[mitcheli]

Seems to me that when I'm working on a build with security in mind, I start with a bare build that is the barest of essentials to boot the system and use the hardware. From then, we add on the packages we need to get just what we need. And as we layer those packages on, we focus on the hardening of the individual services. As time has gone on, in a virtualized environment, it's very easy to build "default" systems that fill certain roles and are sized for different resource levels. It would seem to me that these standardized baselines would serve well for an installation model. Fedora does that to some extent (loosely) but that could be built upon more I would think. So if I want a firewall, I could get a bare boned installation with enhanced iptables rules and hardening provisions commonly used. Or if I want a web server, perhaps a slightly less bareboned installation with the needed scripting tools (PHP, Perl, etc?), etc... It seems the biggest questions I've dealt with when building new systems is, role, size, and whether or not it's for development. Outside of that, the builds are rather typical.

Re:businessmen in software

[ClassicASP]

True that. Seen this routine a bunch of times in various ways, and in the end its really about developers making money. You can just keep it simple and go with what works (as you can see from my handle, I'm old-school). But I've met many less-experienced and less-knowledgable business owners who were totally sold on complex methodologies by their developers, and as time progressed they ended up with something thats very bulky and complicated that required a big learning curve to get past in order for any new developer to be added to the scene to jump in and start getting anything done. Business owners don't want to have to pay money for someone to just sit there and learn, so they can't find anyone else to work on their site who they consider "qualified". So whats happened is they've found themselves pretty much stuck with whomever originally wrote their code, which of course keeps their job secure and empowers them to command more money for their work. To me it just feels and sounds too much like a scam, and I hold myself to higher standards than that.

Re:businessmen in software

[Joining Yet Again]

Like I said: "businessmen in software" - you're demonstrating it well, Anonymous coward.

While "actual workers" have always had to deal with managers, helicopter management by overgrown software developers who slipped into the comfy chair is a newer phenomenon.

Short-sightedness is not seeing that we're just seeing the same old methods but with new names, more rules, and more paperwork. See other replies on this thread. But I couldn't help but hear you type your post with Cabaret's "Tomorrow belongs to me" playing in the background, and this made me laugh, so thanks.