fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 04:03:17PM -0400, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
>> > Where, keep in mind, "slow" is defined as twice a year, right?
>> Yes.
>
> I think this is a remarkable definition of slow. Especially if we can
> provide options for people who want a faster path to do so.
>
>> > I don't think that's fair at all. Fedora is unique in a lot of ways, and a
>> > waterfall of updates isn't essential to that uniqueness.
>> List those ways please, aside from the relationship with Red Hat/CentOS.
>
> Why brush that aside?

Because it is very obvious, and it also subjective as a pro or con.

> Historically, there's been a lot of fear in Fedora of
> being perceived as merely a beta or technology preview for RHEL. By now,
> though, we've proven that that's not the case, that what we've said all
> along is true — Fedora is a great distro in its own right! But it'd be silly
> of us to overcompensate by distancing ourselves completely. Fedora is part
> of an entire ecosystem, and part of that ecosystem includes an open source
> company which has a great enterprise distribution based on the work we do
> here, and which employees a great number of engineers, hackers, developers,
> and designers all contributing significantly to free software. Why *start*
> by cutting that out?
>
> (All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and
> education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system
> and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?)
>
> I also think that it's not true that just because Ubuntu aims to be a
> general purpose distribution, we can't as well. It's unlike the
> coke-vs-pepsi analogy you suggest, because it's all free software and
> parallel development actually benefits everyone. Two groups can approach the
> same target differently.
>
> But that's not all there is to it.
>
> Fedora has a great release engineering team and process. There's a serious
> emphasis on shipping solid, professional releases. Ubuntu has a process too,
> but they end up with things like a zero-day last-minute respin of 10.04.
> That would not have happened in the same way with Fedora.
>
> There may be work to do on QA of packages that get put out as updates, but
> the overall QA process in Fedora is great. The packaging guidelines and
> initial review process are well-considered and polished by real-world use.
> We've got great package-development infrastructure and tools, and great
> people working on those.
>
> Fedora is built on important technology. For example: kickstart. It's better
> than Debian's scripted installs, and Ubuntu's implementation of kickstart
> is.... lacking. This is cool stuff, and it enables other cool stuff like
> Fedora spins. Another example: from one point of view, RPM vs. dpkg is
> negligible, but there are technical features which make it nicer for some
> purposes (like a derived distribution). My point isn't to argue about the
> relative virtues of different technology, but that key points of the
> distribution-glue are unique.
>
> And Fedora *is* fast -- see above.


I would like to point out how nuanced and somewhat subjective the
differences you stated are, even if I may agree with most of them.

-- 
Fedora 13
(www.pembo13.com)