Fedora Holds Summit To Map Its Future 92
lisah writes "Last month members of the Fedora community met for a three-day summit (wiki here) designed to chart a course for future version releases as well as to plan other Fedora projects. Team members say they want to leverage the enthusiasm of a community that has demonstrated a willingness to develop Fedora Extras (add-on features to the Core package) and support Fedora Legacy (past releases). Red Hat's community development manager, Greg DeKoenigsberg, said, 'Community contributors have proven conclusively over the past 18 months that they can build packages every bit as well as Red Hat engineers — better, in some cases.' In addition to creating several proposals that will be introduced the the community for input and feedback, the summit also gave rise to the newly-created position of Fedora Infrastructure Leader." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
First Post! (Score:1, Interesting)
Fedora Linux is actually better than RHEL, because you can patch it easily (RHEL is a pain in the ass to patch), it contains more packages, and its community support (especially academia) is as high as it has ever been.
The Fedora paperwork is the current killer (Score:2, Interesting)
Only later did I find out that I had to jump through some more hoops.
What would be helpful is a more streamlined, and MUCH better documented system.
Given the other packages which conspicously lack Fedora support, I suspect that I'm not alone.
I do hope this changes, as Fedora is my preferred distro. But right now, it is definitely hurting contributions to the project.
Re:High time to stop duplication (Score:3, Interesting)
The amount of duplication within the open source world is actually pretty limited, I would say just about enough to provide the benefits I pointed out earlier, and to cater to the many niches there are (e.g. some people want full-featured systems, others want simple ones, yet others want performant ones, etc.)
``They already have some coherence, thanks to the Kernel''
Err, well. The kernel is only a tiny part of the system, and one you don't typically code for directly. The personality of the system is actually much more determined by the standard library of whatever programming language you're using.
``Imagine how much more work could be done to a package manager if every distro was using the same.''
I don't think package managers are or should be so complicated that they'd greatly benefit from everyone hacking the same one. At any rate, the diversity allowed me to choose the vastly superior apt-get when most people were using rpm (I know there are working wrappers for rpm that resolve dependencies nowadays, but back in the day, there weren't). I'm glad about that.
``Imagine how good OpenOffice and KOffice could have been if there were not 200 other Open Source alternatives.''
Again, I'm not sure it matters much. I think adding more developers to OpenOffice.org will only contribute to the bloat, leading to new problems. Koffice seems to make great progress, despite the existence of various competitors (OOo being the big one). AbiWord was a good word processor years ago, before OOo existed, and I can't imagine it's gotten worse since.
``I am glad to hear about efforts to unify KDE and Gnome.''
You mean that they're standardizing mechanisms? I'm glad about that, too. Standards are good. So are alternatives. Both can, and should, exist at the same time.
Hot distribution chronology (Score:2, Interesting)
1996-1997: Slackware
1997-1999: Debian
1999-2001: Redhat
2001-2002: Fedora
2003-2004: Suse
2004-2006: Ubuntu