Goodbye, Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository
> maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a
> failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked
> -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it
> depends on and be unrecoverably screwed.  But the underlying problems
> run much deeper.

We only have your analysis of the problem. Not a description of the 
actual problem. That would be more helpful. Perhaps a bug report.

> * Chronic governance problems.

More details required. I have a special interest in this.

* Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane,
  consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
> 
> * A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.

Last time you claimed this, I requested you to point out specific issues 
which you agreed to. That was never delivered. Your actual submission 
was struck after the reviewer pointed out some things to fix

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-December/msg00538.html
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=220736

> * Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding
>   another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum. 

RPM indeed drifted but I dont think it actually stagnated. Anyway 
http://rpm.org for more details. RPM doesnt do automatic dependency 
resolving. Yum does. I did read somewhere your claim that introducing 
yum was a big change that put Fedora in a position of advantage or some 
such thing.

> * Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.

Unless this is just about proprietary codecs, Red Hat continues to do a 
lot of work on the desktop

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

> * Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with
>   any attitude other than blank denial.

We spend a lot of time even recently on FUDCon Boston 2007 discussing 
this. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureCodecBuddy

Rahul