[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Horst H. von Brand]

Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at 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 at 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?

[People working on EPEL do so because they are interested in EPEL, which
 clearly isn't the same as being interested in Fedora... if EPEL went away,
 probably most of them would leave too.]

> If people were investing the time they (as I feel waste) on supporting
> EPEL into Fedora, Fedora would be better.

How true. But see above...

> >  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. A clone is
wellcome. And RHEL is popular in part because it works together with
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.

> > > 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! 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...

Fedora (or any other large group of people) will move where the majority
wants to go... 

> > >> > 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...

> - if they mean it as "Fedora is technically too unstable",

Because there is no "long term maintenance"...

>                                                            then this
> people should start working on improving the situation

Which one? Fedora is about /not/ "long term" but "bleeding edge"...

>                                                        or (better) quit
> Fedora.

Do so, then.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile 2340000       Fax:  +56 32 2797513