[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> Itamar - IspBrasil wrote:
>>
>> any chance to increase the life of fedora releases ?
>>
>> or fedora will be only blending edge ?
>>
>> In my opinion fedora is losing space from centos and ubuntu
> 
> ...
> 
>> The brazilian government, one of the biggest Fedora Case of the world is
>> changing from Fedora/ Red Hat to Ubuntu/Debian.
> 
> The problem was at an initial point, when Fedora was considered "for
> enthusiasts only". A lot of previous "RedHat Linux enthusiasts" just
> switch to CentOS (and similar RHEL-based systems), no more using Fedora,
> because "it is marked as a non-for-production system even by its creators".
> 
The fact that they switched to CentOS is *good* for Fedora.  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.  At the same time, CentOS is a
derivative distro of Fedora.  That means that the things you learn in
CentOS will have some bearing on Fedora; the things you learn in Fedora
will have some bearing on CentOS; and if you want to affect the packages
and decisions that go into the next version of CentOS, you can have a
great deal of impact by working on those changes within Fedora.

> 
> 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.  The reason is not about stability.  It is about
updates.  Once Fedora stops getting updates we'd have to upgrade to the
next Fedora release with all of the churn that causes for vastly
unrelated pieces of the OS.  We'd much rather spend our time developing
new features of the infrastructure and fixing bugs in our software and
deployments than updating the OS every six months and figuring out what
caused our current services to break when we do.

> Maybe some previois release? How many key
> people work under Fedora Desktop "all the time"?

I'll also add my voice here as someone who runs Fedora on all his
machines.  But I have a question of my own: is this a question intended
to inform you of the true facts of what percent of key contributors run
Fedora?  Or leading question intended to make people think that Red Hat
employees do not run Fedora without any prior research into the matter?

> (Maybe RedHat employees
> of them are compelled to use RHEL Desktop in basic working hours?)
> 
Untrue.

> And finally, when you will discover the actual situation, ask yourself
> -- why Brasilian should use Fedora (and Fedora-based RHEL), when even
> Fedora's fathers do not use it for anything real?
> 

So on the one hand, since your base assumptions about usage of Fedora by
key people is not based in fact, I probably shouldn't answer this.  On the
other, I'd like to say that there are different distributions for
different purposes.  CentOS and RHEL fill one important niche that
Fedora is unsuited for due to its fast pace.  Fedora, in turn, is going
to be the place where people who want to get their hands on new
technology sooner are going to want to be.

As for your particular use-case, mentioned in another message, it sounds
like you want to be using CentOS/RHEL and backporting the services you
need (as you say you do now).  A distribution is going to be hard
pressed to do what you want in all cases because they have to keep
sanity for all their different customers.  If you need a new version of
libxml2 to get a hot new feature, will that cause problems for other
customers?  If they need a new version of apache because the modules
they're developing requires it will that cause problems for you?

-Toshio

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