On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 17:42 -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de wrote:
On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 16:48 -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de wrote:
On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 16:53 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de wrote:
On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 12:38 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > Dmitry Butskoy wrote: > > Itamar - IspBrasil wrote:
[snip]
> The fact that they switched to CentOS is *good* for Fedora. I can not disagree more - To me, it's yet another evidence of Fedora being on the loose.
You're going to have to expound on that. I do not see Centos in any way as in competition with Fedora.
EPEL drains away resources from Fedora.
Centos is something everyone should be proud of.
Well, to me CentOS is as important as any other arbitrary Linux distro. I am glad they are around, but not more and not less.
It is around becase RHEL is popular, and open source.
And non-free
It /is/ free... you pay for support only.
Wrong. RHEL is opensource, but it is not free. You can't get RHEL binaries anywhere.
- If it was free, the CentOS folks could start directly
contribute to Fedora
No...
Why not? CentOS would go out of business, because RH binaries could be used instead => their resources would be freed.
> CentOS's goals are better oriented to the needs of someone > that wants to deploy a system and run it for years. Fedora is > good for people who want to get the latest technologies from > upstream as soon as they're stable enough to integrate into a > running system.
Right. But why can't Fedora do better?
Define "better"... "Good Fedora" is bleeding edge, not fully stabilized software, experimental stuff that may pan out (or it might not, being replaced by something else), changing APIs (literally and sysadmin-wise), fast turnaround.
Yes, this is what it is supposed to be. Unfortunately this doesn't apply.
Current Fedora isn't much more than a single-user desktop-focused RH development/rawhide snapshot.
I feel Fedora could do better.
Sure. With more devs, servers, time, etc.
... less bureaucracy, less committees/less chiefs/more Indians, different people, different strategies.
Show how!
Ease reviews, bodhi, packagedb, koji, bugzilla, track, re-consider FTBS, work-flow, trademark policy.
Definite proposals that can be discussed?
What does "trademark policy" have to do with anything, BTW?
A lot.
E.g. right now, the tools being in use are a heterogenious mixture of separate tools,
Unix...
My point is: Lack of integration and them being over-loaded with features.
are often broken,
Fixing hands are presumably wellcome...
Well, ...
are far from easy to use
Concrete proposals on what to change how?
Many, many tiny details. In fact, there are tons of usability issues with all of them.
One pretty obvious example: bugzilla. IMO, it has never been less usable than it is now. It isn't possible anymore to reopen bugs, automatic CC:-adding when commenting to BZs, many lists are hidden in dropdowns, tags have changes (assignee), FTBS activities have rendered bugzilla "unsearchable", flagged review stuff, etc.
and aim at
implementing a highly bureaucratic process/work-flow.
Again, proposals, please?
E.g.: Work-flow: branch fc11 early (discussed and shot down last week).
Telling everybody here how awful things are going isn't helping an iota. Everything has its limits, and for every desirable quality (newest shiny toys, support for the newest fad in hardware in software) there is a cost (can't be supported in the long range, fast turnaround, set procedures to handle a huge stream of new stuff)
But baring a sudden increase in those, I would much prefer to see Fedora focus on dev and testing, let other distros pretty things up.
ACK. Unfortunately, Fedora is drifting away from this group towards single-user desktops (e.g. OLPC).
Then work towards drifting the opposite direction...
One reason why I am agitating ...
"Agitating" doesn't help much.
Of cause it does. It help making people aware about problems.
Fedora (or any other large group of people) will move where the majority wants to go...
Well, deployment of an OS to servers, will always be a "minority use case" and will always collide somewhere with mere desktop oriented developments.
So?
Examples: NetworkManager, PulseAudio, setroubleshoot, SELinux-policies, PackageKit, defaults ...
Why would they, after often suggesting that Fedora _not_ be used on production servers, use Fedora on their production servers?
Depends on how they mean it:
- if they are referring to "long term maintained/everlasting support"
servers, they are right.
"Servers" are "long-time maintained" by definition...
To me, "server" is a "use-case of an OS" and is not at all connected to running the same OS for many years.
That is "testing an OS with server workload", something different entirely.
Just because some piece of hardware is labeled "server" or caged into a rack, doesn't make it a "server".
A server is a use-case of software, the hardware doesn't actually matter.
Yes, no doubt, running the same OS on a larger number of machines for a longer time helps maintenance, but I do not see how this is connected to a particular machine serving as "clients" or "servers".
Yes, no doubt, there are use-cases where "long-term API" stability is important, but this applies to client use-cases as well as to server use-cases.
Those /are/ the "server" use cases you want so badly!
NO! I am talking about file-, yp/ldap-, nfs-, print-, streaming-, audio (mpd etc.)-, video-, VCS (CVS, svn, git, etc.)-, http-, SQL (postgres, mysql, etc.)- servers and similar.
Finally, yes, no doubt, Fedora is not the "shoe that fits all sizes" nor are CentOS or RHEL, but ... this doesn't mean that Fedora may not be applicable to server scenarios.
- if they mean it as "Fedora is technically too unstable",
Because there is no "long term maintenance"...
Again, I don't see how "lack of stability" and "no long term maintenance" are linked together at all, nor how server and client use-cases matter.
Again: "stability" is /not/ "when run on 10 thousand machines only one crashes a day", it is "runs for thousands of days before crashing", and /that/ is as un-Fedora as it gets.
Again: server is a use-case of SW. Like on desktops, I can live with rebooting once a week due to kernel updates and don't need 1000hrs of uptimes nor do I have 1000s of users nor machines.
What matters in use-cases of short lived-distros such as Fedora is: Upgrades "must simply work" and (admin-) personnel must be able to handle them in a particular scenario.
Sure. Test upgrading for a few months until everything is A-OK,
No, rolling release, respun distros.
Lack of stability,
Design objective.
No, mismanagement, lack of QA
... tools
Huh?
koji, bodhi, bugzilla, packagedb ...
One detail: The amount of administration emails I am receiving from koji, bodhi, packagedb: Often, several 1000s per month.
The lack of people to me is not a cause, it's a consequence of mistakes in Fedora's history.
Is there /really/ a lack of people?
Yes, all over the place.
Examples: * reviews * Fedora infrastructure "wining" on "lack of people" * Fedora infrastructure "signing" issues.
Are any statistics of contributors (and contributions) at hand?
None that I am aware about.
Ralf