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.
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Sorry but I call BS.
I use Fedora at home and RHEL at work. Fedora continues to be slow and unstable (that's FC5, I haven't upgraded to 6 yet). It's no longer a bad as it was (but it isn't as stable as the old RH9) and I suspect there will be massive improvement in the next version as
Fedora is important (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fedora is important (Score:4, Informative)
I think this was definitely the norm about 3 years ago when it was created. Certainly, before that, Red Hat had incredible name recognition, and as it result, most new Linux users tended to get Red Hat (sometimes even get retail copies at the time).
However, I would claim that Ubuntu has now usurped Red Hat's (and Fedora's) position as the most recognized distribution among Linux newbies. Certainly Distro Watch [distrowatch.com] agrees with me. Not that DW is conclusive evidence, but it tends to be a good indicator.
I do agree with you though; Fedora is important, even if it is not quite as popular as Ubuntu among newbies.
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Do you have any evidence that it tends to be a good indicator?
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Why is this interesting? Well because when they come to me (resident Linux user) because they "want to get back into Linux" they immediately ask/talk about Red Hat. I
Fedora is unimportant (Score:1)
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I loved RH in the day, ran Fedora Core up til a couple weeks ago, when I switched to Edgy amd64. Some stuff is a bit different, but all in all, I still like it.
I'll always have a soft spot in my head for FC, though...
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Re:back that mutha up!!! (Score:1)
Need I say more????
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Many people did this in the bad old Red Hat days, and I think it's still common today. I try to make people understand that there isn't one Linux; rather, there are many distributions, and each should be considered a separate OS. At least, I don't think you can reasonably consider LOAF and Mandriva the same OS...
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please do explain how it is that RPM does not work very well. I hear this all the time but have yet to see the evidence.
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I've installed many bad RPMs (admittedly, mostly prior to RPM v4, but I jumped ship to Debian-based distros around that time) that have destroyed the entire configuration to the point where no dependencies resolve correctly any more. All of the responses I've heard about this sort of behaviour are something to the effect of "use the source RPM then", or whatever. The point being, things need to be painless. Sure, I could debug the RPM database (occasionally I had success in sorting out what went wrong), but
Your error is not RPM's fault (Score:5, Informative)
No. All binaries are targeted that way. When you run
Binary compatibility is hard.
The "--force" switch tells RPM, "I know you think this is a bad idea. I say I know otherwise. Do it anyway". You can't then turn around and complain that things broke when you did that. RPM took your word for it when you said you knew better. If you didn't know better, that's your own damn fault, not RPM's.
Put more briefly: If you think you need to use --force, you're almost certainly wrong.
Re:Fedora is important (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because Red Hat has never contributed anything to the community:
http://sources.redhat.com/projects.html [redhat.com]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions [fedoraproject.org]
Fedora isn't perfect, and RH did make - IMO - do a poor job of transitioning from the "old" RHL series to Fedora, but to suggest that they don't
contribute anything to Linux and OSS is just ridiculous.
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Further, the "old RHL" may have been handled badly, but it was not the distro that was going to be pulling people in.
My first linux was Suse 8.2, but the last few releases have not worked for me...I have been using Fedora Core since FC1...I have strayed, but always returned to it and find it to be one of the best distros ever. FC6 is truely a great distro, and if it had all the hype of Ubuntu, it would be at the top of the distrowatch list.
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Maybe, but it needs improving. (Score:2)
Fedora Core is
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Now you can still recompile from source. Admittedly the documentation isn't as good as it should be, but rpmbuild isn't rocket science and if you cut your teeth on SLS/MCC you should be able to figure out a
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If your life is significantly affected by the actions of stupid people, you're screwed already. If it isn't, you aren't going to care about this. While you might possibly be able to justify calling this point
Good ideas (Score:5, Funny)
Makes sense that they plan their future. Pre-arranged funerals can ease the burdon on the survivors.
Oh wait, this isn't about BSD?
Fedora Legacy Dropped (Score:4, Informative)
I agree that we can't support all the versions in perpetuity, but I thought it would have been more helpful if they had included some reason other than "sorry, we just can't do it anymore". Did it not fit into the big picture of their support? What about future security fixes? etc. etc. As it was, it was very abrupt.
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It's been hashed out on the mailing list [redhat.com]. The upshot is this: Fedora Legacy depended heavily on volunteers. While there has been demand for them to release updates, there have never been eno
Re:Fedora Legacy Dropped (Score:4, Informative)
Random Rule of Slashdot #843: The one time you don't use Preview will be the one time you should have.
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Typically a Fedora Core release comes out every six or seven months. Red Hat's flagship offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), by contrast, comes out every 18 to 24 months. Under the new lifecycle plan a Fedora Core release would have 13 months of support.
"Anything beyond this really seems to be corner cases that would really be better served by something like CentOS for free, RHEL for rock solid support, or Oracle for crackmonkies," Keating wrote. "What does this mean for the "Legacy"
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why?
theres plenty of good old redhat (6.2!) and fedora servers quietly humming away in the background doing their jobs quite nicely where i work ( and previous gigs too ).
sure, these are mainly internal systems that are used for in house stuf, but beyond the niceties of packaged installs of apps/utils, a adistro doesnt die just because 'official' support for them drops off over time.
my policy for fedora servers is eve
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> why?
Lack of security updates. I am a strong advocate for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" -- but a system with unpatched vulnerabilities definitely qualifies as broke, and I don't have the time to track said vulnerabilities and patch them by hand.
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see, the way i see it, if you have time to migrate to another distro, you have time to migrate to the newer release of the same distro, but with less pain.
i just make sure i find time every 12-18 months. same flavour distro, newer packages.
( i never could fully appreciate the debian ( hence ubuntu..) habit of smashing packages down to the smallest possible components so your apt-install has to grab a bazillion packages to get anything useful going, but each to their
Re:Fedora Legacy Dropped (Score:4, Informative)
What has Red Hat ever done for us? (Score:1, Funny)
They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.
LORETTA:
And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG:
Yeah.
LORETTA:
And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.
REG:
Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES:
Re:Fedora's imminent death (Score:4, Informative)
I think you fundamentally missed the point of fedora there. Fedora is 100% free, so much so that it doesn't ship with mp3 or DVD support. It's a small hastle but it's the price of freedom... so not really proprietary
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No mention of users (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, developers are important enough. Also, with open source software, the line between developers and users is very thin.
Re:No mention of users (Score:5, Funny)
Not really. The developers are the guys who write the code, and the users are the ones who bitch about it. Same as any other piece of software.
Re:No mention of users (Score:4, Insightful)
While that's true to an extent, there are two things that make open source software different from the norm:
1. Many developers write the software for their own use (rather than for money)
2. Users can and do change the software to better suit them
This is what blurs the line between developers and users. Of course, both of these are also reasons why developers can and do ignore users' requests, and get away with it.
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Re:No mention of users (Score:4, Informative)
It has never set out to be a user oriented system. It only exists to push the envelope. If you choose to use it in any of its incarnations, you have to accept that. Otherwise, install RHEL or Ubuntu.
And no, that wasn't meant as a flame, it's the truth. Is Ubuntu based on Debian unstable, is RHEL based on FC6 ?Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Transparency needed to come first, and that's way better now. Fedora's governance was non-obvious, with a different Leader of the Week handing down Red Hat fiats. Now they seem to be consciously trying to expose more of
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. Bu
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High time to stop duplication (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine how much more work could be done to a package manager if every distro was using the same. Imagine how good OpenOffice and KOffice could have been if there were not 200 other Open Source alternatives. I am glad to hear about efforts to unify KDE and Gnome. We need to focus on something similar for a lot of other applications too. And this should be one of the top most priorities for Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu/Debian teams.
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OK, which project would we have been better off without? Can you be sure that Project A would have come up with the feature they were copying from Project B? Or that Project B would have been as successful without learning from Project C's mistakes? If the people from Project B had been working on Project A instead, would th
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If it was a choice based on technical merit, we wouldn't be going with the memory-leaking hog.
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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
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``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.
[/quote]
Actually, a good question
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Imagine how good Microsoft Word and WordPerfect would be if there were not 200 other alternative. How good Minix and Xenix would be if there were no other x86 Unix-like operating systems ... Competition is good. People contribute code and ideas to the project they care about, not to the program they are supposed to be using. If there were only two options the people who really cared about the other alternatives wouldn't suddenly switch camp -- they would simply go site on the sideline, to everybody's lo
OSS and natural selection... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can probably point out tons and tons of failed forks (I believe mplayer has had a few unsuccessful forking attempts). They happen all the time.
A shining example of a 'fork' like endeavor coexisting with the original is Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a set of technical and marketing goals that didn't mesh perfectly with Debian. Ubuntu was justified and the community has greatly accepted it. Meanwhile Debian has not really lost much in its userbase (most Ubuntu users come from RPM based distros rather than Debian) because the concepts Debian hold as important still matter.
And sometimes fork reflect the need to meaningfully continue a project that has for all intents and purposes lost touch. Xorg is a fork of XFree86 that has effectively killed off the original. They still twitch, but they've even taking down their ultimately embarassingly list of distros that still supported them (generally by not having updated yet rather than a concious future decision). The breaking point was a licensing technicality, but it's clear that XFree86 had technical problems as well in adopting new graphical features.
Hell, linux itself is spiritually (not technically) a fork of minix. The basic point is simple, projects by and large once established tend not to do revolutionary new things as the people at the head are heading basically where they meant to go. Forking is a logical way for revolutionary change to happen and the userbase decides the fate of the original and new.
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They may value the learning experience or the skills they develop. They may value the recognition. They may value the experience of bein
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Imagine how much more work could be done to a package manager if every distro was using the same. Imagine how good OpenOffice and KOffice could have been if there were not 200 other Open Source alternatives.
You're probably not consciously aware of it, but the only reason why you think like this is because Microsoft introduced and then encouraged/enforced a monoculture, during
CentorOS? Fedorent? (Score:2)
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I guess I don't see why this would be Red Hat's problem to solve. If somebody's copying my paper during a test, they don't really have a right to complain that "you were erasing and rewriting your answers way too often; it was impossible to keep up".
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Hot distribution chronology (Score:2, Interesting)
1996-1997: Slackware
1997-1999: Debian
1999-2001: Redhat
2001-2002: Fedora
2003-2004: Suse
2004-2006: Ubuntu
maybe (Score:1)
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I don't agree with your list of the hot distribution
Actually I think nobody will agree on what distribution is or was the hot distribution, so this list is quite pointless.
Wish List (Score:2)
1. Include Suns JVM. Get rid of the GCJ stuff. I believe the JVM is GPL2 now, so it should be easy to do now.
2. Easy video driver support. This has improved, but it would be great if it was like SuSE. I have an Nvidia card and I can get it to work, but at the end of the day another update comes out and it appears to break all over again. At the worst case, please have an official way to get it installed and then support it in your updates.
3. Audio/Video Playback - Make it eas
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Could happen. As you said, it's finally been released under an open-source license. Not sure about patent status, though.
Not going to happen. Fedora has a policy of including only open-source, Free with a capital F software that is not encumbered by patents. NVidia drivers and Flash aren't open source. DVD and MP3 playback are covered by patents.
There's a group called Fedora Unity [fedoraunity.org] that does this.
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However, as far as non free software, Fedora could provide a much easier way to get that software and then work on not breaking it with an update.
How many people try Fedora out for a client and don't want to load Flash, MP3 and DVD support?
Again, this is just a wish list, but the video driver issue is a real pain.
Red Hat will close Fedora within 2 years... (Score:1)