RFE: Retire Fedora Core 4 only _after_ FC6 has been released.

[Mike A. Harris]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 04:24 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>>Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 22:07 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>FC X goes legacy when FC Z test 2 gets released. Always been policy. 
>>>>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ
>>>
>>>Pardon, but is Fedora under RH's dictatorship and has to take RH's
>>>decisions for granted? Or is Fedora a "community driven project" and
>>>decisions are subject to the community?
>>
>>Community discussion influences decision making, however one person,
>>or a handful of people coming forward and demanding something does not
>>mean that the demands will be agreed to and used simply because someone
>>demanded it.
> 
> If you were been reading fedora-list@, you'd know that this request
> isn't a single individual's request. Check fedora-list@'s archive from
> earlier this week and you'll probably know.

Half the userbase could demand that we include mp3 playback support, the
NTFS filesystem driver, or the proprietary Nvidia driver too.  Quantity
of people requesting something does not necessarily be the sole deciding
factor in the equation.

A number of factors are considered, including but not limited to legal
concerns, licensing of the code (ie: OSS), general usefulness, existance
of similar functionality in existing packages (or lack of), technical
aspects of the decision, quality of code, and a long list of other
things.  On top of things passing through the Fedora Project's mandate
filters, a variety of other factors influence the decision making
process.

While "lots of users are requesting it" is sometimes a factor that
helps something to happen, it is not an exclusive determining factor
in the Fedora decision making process.  While the process could be
somewhat described, I don't think it could be described by a solid
set of rules that could be fed into a computer or something with
which to make concrete yes/no type logic decisions based on an
amount of input.  Much of the process requires a lot of thought
put into things on a case by case, idea by idea, package by package,
etc. basis.

A lynch mob 10000 strong, alone, or even 100000 strong for some issue
is not going to be a convincing argument, with or without baseball bats
for any request, and that is a good thing IMHO.


>>  Likewise, simply because someone's idea, request, feature
>>enhancement, etc. may not get accepted by the project, it doesn't mean
>>the project isn't open to discussion and community involvement.
> 
> Is it? I regret to say this, but this isn't necessarily my impression on
> RH's role in Fedora.

That's a valid opinion, of course it is possible that the Fedora Project
isn't the most suitable distribution for your personal needs.Have you 
tried Ubuntu, Debian, or Gentoo?  Just a thought.  Might be worth the
effort to experiment with other distributions, in case another one more
closely aligns with your expectations.  Never hurts to experiment
anyway.




-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.