Proposal for the future of Fedora

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 14:55, Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 08/23/2010 03:17 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 12:09, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>  On 08/23/2010 08:41 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My apologies, that statement came out more inflammatory and damning than
>>>> I really intended it to be. I was merely trying to highlight that a lot
>>>> of people have a view of Fedora as sort of the "White Sands" of Linux.
>>>> They view it as where code goes until it's ready to be put into stable
>>>> releases. This is a public impression that we need to change.
>>>
>>> It is not very inaccurate.  We are certainly early adopters of new
>>> technology and sometimes it is rough around the edges.  We can either be
>>> more conservative or try and test things more vigorously.  Probably a
>>> combination of both would help.
>>
>> It does not matter if it is not accurate or not. It is the one thing
>> that I get over and over from people who used some release and found
>> their system completely 'different' after a set of updates. "How can
>> you guys expect this to be the next Enterprise Linux?" Sure they each
>> want something new and cool on our system that no-one else has yet..
>> but they really only want that not everything else. All of them have
>> switched to 'other' OS's because while slower they could get better
>> stability on what they wanted to remain stable.
>
> I think part of this may simply be a need to set expectations appropriately.

I believe so too. The expectation I heard is usually that Fedora is
RHL, but in reality that is a view of people who may never have run
RHL or have not run it in oh 6-7 years?

> There is some irony in the fact that the most common questions I get
> asked are "What is new in Fedora $CURRENT?" and "What is coming in
> Fedora $CURRENT+1", and the most common complaint I hear is "Why did you
> change $FOO in Fedora $CURRENT?!?".

It is funny how those conversations can be from the same person
without any hint of irony. Cognitive dissonance is a wonderful thin.

I think its one of those middle ground areas. Most of these people
were looking for something newer in Fedora than was in RHEL but they
didn't like the weekly 100MB shuffle that seems to happen. What it
seemed like they were looking for was something in between Fedora and
RHEL where they had some stability and could pull what they wanted
from Fedora to do whatever new thing they were needing. Sort of the
niche IUS is filling for RHEL/CentOS but maybe a bit more 'daring'.


> ~spot
>



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
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