Fedora Core 3: Cruising The Bleeding Edge

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

I came across your review of Fedora Core 3 ( 
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5670/1/). I would like 
point out that your characterisation of Fedora Project as  "This is the 
playground for Red Hat engineers and random volunteer developers to go 
nuts and try out wacky new things, and users get to play along" is 
entirely inaccurate.

* Fedora Projects has a core as well as extras repository both of which 
has a publicly accessible revision control system at 
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/
* Fedora core is entirely maintained by Red Hat developers
* Fedora Extras is a repository of contributors who package software 
that is developed in sync with Fedora core

While Fedora project is intended to less conservative than Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux and have a faster release cycle, it is certainly not a 
"lets get crazy" thing . Packaging in both core and extras goes through 
a good amount of QA before releases. some of the bugs like the udev one 
in the Fedora Core 3 release are unfortunate and should be avoided but 
thats not a result of developers being "wacky".

Moving on to the next parts,  I appreciate your recommendation to read 
the release notes. This is something users frequently miss out. Linking 
to the release notes within your review would have been a good idea too.


"A heavily-patched 2.6.9 kernel (currently 2.6.9-1.667). Note that Red 
Hat always modifies kernels extensively; this is not unusual."

Dave Jones, the Kernel maintainer for Fedora has provided the following 
links which explain these patches.

Fedora Core 3- http://people.redhat.com/davej/patchlist-fc3.txt
Development tree - http://people.redhat.com/davej/patchlist-rawhide.txt

As you can see for yourself the patches are minor and necessary. Fedora 
Project has a goal of staying close to upstream as much as possible 
however  Fedora releases are time based while the upstream kernel 
development releases are not and hence some of the patches that fixes 
important things are available in Fedora kernel till it gets merged 
upstream in the subsequent releases. Adding patches is a maintainance 
issue and developers prefer not to do that within reasonable limitations 
so an extensive amount of patches are not scalable as well as unusual 
for any package in Fedora.

On services running unecessarily, some of these including the pcmcia 
services running unnecessarily on a desktop system has been fixed in the 
development tree. More works needs to be done on that area. You have 
mentioned that a GNOME menu editor is not available in Fedora Core 3. 
While this is not a Fedora specific issue, I consider it a important one 
neverthless, Smeg (http://www.realistanew.com/projects/smeg/) is 
currently under review 
(https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-extras-list/2005-May/msg01107.html)  
for packaging in Fedora Extras repository (enabled by default in Fedora 
Core 4) hopefully alleviates this problem to a extend till we get a menu 
editor as part of GNOME 2.12 
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-May/msg00232.htm)

Thank you for taking the time to review a Fedora release.

regards
Rahul