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.
Proof?
Urgh, isn't that obvious?
E.g.: - Build server resources, mirror resources. - People are using/testing EPEL instead of Fedora. - Fedora infrastructure, e.g. EPEL enlarges the packagedb by almost factor 2. - EPEL would force Fedora contributors to test on both RHEL and 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 - If it was free, the CentOS folks could start directly contribute to Fedora or RHEL. Right now, it's them wasting time to workaround on RHEL being non-free.
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? 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.
E.g. right now, the tools being in use are a heterogenious mixture of separate tools, are often broken, are far from easy to use and aim at implementing a highly bureaucratic process/work-flow.
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 ...
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.
This situation seems to be reflected in the Fedora project itself. Guess, how many Fedora infrastructure servers are run under the latest "stable" Fedora release?
As few as possible.
IMO, a fundamental management/infrastructure mistake - If these people were using Fedora, they would be facing the issues Fedora users are facing everyday and likely would being to understand why people complain about Fedora.
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.
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.
...
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.
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.
then this
people should start working on improving the situation
Which one?
Lack of stability, lack of usability, deficiencies of the infrastructure, bureaucracy, short-livedness ... tools
The lack of people to me is not a cause, it's a consequence of mistakes in Fedora's history.
Fedora is about /not/ "long term" but "bleeding edge"...
"Leading edge" doesn't necessarily have to be linked to "bleeding" nor "unstable". It's sad, the latter is true wrt. Fedora.
or (better) quit
Fedora.
Do so, then.
I haven't given in, yet.
The cause for my current dissatisfaction is Fedora's infrastructure and Fedora's leadership. They have driven Fedora/have allowed Fedora to move into what I consider to be an unhealthy direction.