yum flavors vs/ fc1, fc2, fc3...infinity

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Fri, July 16, 2004 12:30 am, John McBride said:

> Actually if you look at the perception of FC on the web, rather than just
> RTFM on fedora, you will see that a lot of criticism is being levied
> along the lines of what I've said from the beginning...that FC was
> originally marketed as something of a "RH9 replacement", a suitable
> "desktop" machine, etc...but there is a lot of grumbling about the
> rapidfire releases, esp. when it appears that an update set would serve
> just as well.

Fedora was never marketed as anything but what it has become.  Its good 
that people are discussing it and its ok that many will rightly decide
its not the distribution for them.  For many people though, Fedora will
be a good choice.

> When I say "marketed", I mean that a lot of people were asking how FC
> stacked up against RH9, especially for home use. For the most part, FC
> was discussed as being a suitable replacement.

Discussed by who?  The goals of the project have been made pretty clear
from the start.

> A true community project would probably ask the user base for comments
> regarding the release schedule, but maybe I'd better not go there.

A true community project can take many forms.  The Fedora community has
been very well defined by RedHat from the start.  Nobody ever pretended
that the community was defined as everyone who ran RHL.  If that had been
the intent there would have been no reason to change anything and Fedora
could have been released as RHL 10.

> That's fine if you want to direct me to the FM and claim that's the one
> and only story, but my gut feeling (shared by a lot of other FC users on
> the web) is that things *have changed*. Increasingly, the perception is
> getting out that FC is a hacker's distro...a sandbox for buggy code.
> That's really different!

People think a lot of things.   It doesn't mean that the goals of the
project should be changed.  For those who "get it" everything is going
along just fine and as expected.   For those who have a situation where
Fedora isn't appropriate, there are lots of alternatives.   There is no
way Fedora will ever be the right choice for everyone.

> RTFM messages can't make that go away. RHEL is just too complex for my
> needs...and for now I have to buy this stuff out of my pocket. That will
> change if I can convince enough people to switch, but right now I can't
> fork out a couple grand to RH.

RHEL may not be the right choice for you either.  Have you looked at
RedHats other offerings like RedHat Desktop or Professional workstation?

> I hope RedHat decides to again make a traditional boxed set with free
> updates and some way of having a private update server, like I'm doing
> with rsync and yum.

They may go back to that someday but for now they've embarked in a new
direction that will hopefully make them a more profitable company.  They
continue to give back to the open source community in many ways.

> Thanks for your input, though. I'm guessing I'll wait for FC3 and hold on
> to that for as long as possible, then hopefully I'll have the leverage to
> get funding for RHEL.

>From your earlier post it really sounds like Fedora is not the best choice
for your situation.  At least not if you want to upgrade all your machines
every time there is a new release.   That sounds like a lot of work and risk.

Cheers,
Sean