What do we want to archive with Fedora?

[Jesse Keating]

On Thursday 21 December 2006 01:50, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> But it's something some people want/think they need(²). Heck, those
> people are probably even willing to put work into it to get it into
> Fedora(³) -- so do we really want to forbid it? I might be wrong, but I
> don't think that's the way to get the community involved properly.

I honestly feel that we'd be doing them a disservice by packaging them up for 
them.  Its vendors like us that are in the position to apply pressure to 
these driver authors to get their stuff beat into shape and merged upstream.

If we package up the drivers, whats the motivation for the driver author to 
get his stuff upstream?  Fedora users have access to the driver, Fedora folks 
are doing the work to keep the driver working, why should they bother?  Why 
should the go through the review to make the driver better?

We have to take advantage of our position as the gateway to our users.  We set 
the bar to a specific point if the hardware / software developer wants to get 
their hardware / software into the hands of our users.  If we lower the bar 
for hardware vendors, why would they ever aspire to the higher bar?  The path 
of least resistance always wins, so _we_ win by not lowering the bar into our 
users, but perhaps making the path to upstream kernel easier, by assisting 
with the review, with the changes suggested, etc... whatever we can do to 
make the software go upstream quicker, THATS how we win.

As to why Tux is in our kenrel?  Historical reasons / customers that want/need 
it.  Yep, its a rhelism, much like Xen was.  Should it be pulled?  If Fedora 
wasn't the direct upstream of RHEL, I'd say yes.  However RHEL pays a lot of 
the Fedora bills, so I'm inclined to indulge them a little bit here and 
there.  Should Red Hat have headcount to ensure that Tux keeps working with 
the new upstream kernels (and that headcount be somebody OTHER than DaveJ)? 
Sure!  Can that happen tomorrow?  Most likely not.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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