Server Admins: Why not Fedora?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 1 November 2013 12:49, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> One of the oft-repeated statements about Fedora is that it's "not good
> for running a server". Clearly, as we embark upon a mission to change
> that fundamental belief, we need to start addressing the problems that
> make Fedora unsuitable to so many people.
>
> I propose that a good place to start here is to carefully enumerate
> the reasons people elect not to use Fedora in their server
> environments. Let's start by gathering the surface problems (in some
> cases, the cargo-cult explanations) and look into what is the real
> underlying problem and how we can fix it with the Fedora Server offering.
>
> To get us started:
>
>  * Fedora moves too quickly!
>    Historically, Fedora's policy has always been to be among thefirst
>    to ship new technology (whether or not it's ready, but that's another
>    discussion). The problem with tracking rapidly-moving upstreams is
>    that they are not all created equally. Some upstreams (e.g. glibc)
>    obsessively avoid backwards-compatible changes between versions.
>    These are the upstreams that Fedora's current approach works well
>    for. These tend to be the low-level features of the operating system
>    that understand that compatibility == relevance. No one will build
>    atop these systems if they don't have a guarantee that it will
>    continue to work. Other upstreams (e.g. much of the Ruby and Java
>    community) tend to focus more on constant innovation without
>    consideration of backporting. This allows them to make bigger changes
>    much faster, but at the cost of constant churn and difficulty to
>    distribution packaging. These are the systems that normally expect
>    consuming applications to just bundle the exact version of the
>    library known to work. This is where we get into the "Fedora moves
>    too quickly" area of things. Whatever we're shipping in the standard
>    location on-disk tends to be preferred by the applications, and if it
>    isn't the same version that upstream wanted to bundle, all bets are
>    off.
>
>
I did an informal poll of places I worked at that used to be Red Hat Linux
or such and are now using other OS's. The overall answer for them was that
perceived problem with Fedora is that it has a 3 month lifetime. That is
the time between release and next beta when every developers attention
switches to and support of the told release is 'done' in cases of deep
problems. And between release N and release N+1 there was too much change
with little integration or available training so that by the time something
was learned it was all thrown away with a new 3 month lifetime.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/server/attachments/20131101/05b1381f/attachment-0001.html>