Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Tue Dec 25 01:51:58 UTC 2007


On Dec 24, 2007 2:51 PM, William Cattey <wdc at mit.edu> wrote:
> apt
> package management system makes a lot of the work to switch from our
> present tightly integrated OS + alternate versions of packages +
> additional packages to alternate versions and additional packages
> layered on a pre-installed system.

And you can't accomplish this with yum in a fedora ecosystem of repositories?


> It is product focus, however that makes Ubuntu attractive to me and
> many at MIT.  With Fedora and Enterprise, the two choices are three
> year old functionality, or bleeding edge functionality.  Example: in
> November Fedora 8 came out with important laptop power management
> functionality, but it also shipped with a broken rewrite of
> NetworkManager, and an alpha version of BIND.  Fedora 6 shifted to
> not getting any attention, and the clock to get off Fedora 7 started
> EVEN BEFORE FEDORA 8 FUNCTIONALITY WAS STABLE!

The NM in F8 is not "broken".. in any event there is the older network
stack that does not rely on NM for usage cases that NM isn't ready
for.  NM works for more network situations for my laptop in F8 did it
did in F7.

> At particular points a particular version is flagged for longer term
> support, but the primary focus is not on exploring new functionality,
> or on back porting popular functionality to an ancient codebase
> tailored to customers afraid of change. It is simply:  Produce a
> usable experience with a balance of stable code and new
> functionality.  What Fedora-based spin has this focus?

Fedora Legacy was tried ealier and had a 2 year live cycle .. and
while there was interest in using such a distribution from a usage
standpoint, there was not enough people interested in contributing to
actually doing to back ports.  When legacy was decommissioned the
Fedora lifecycle was adjust to give approximately 13 months of
updates, along individuals to 'skip' a Fedora release.  There's
absolutely nothing stopping another community attempt at 2 year
target.


-jef




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