Some thoughts on "ESR: Goodbye Fedora"

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 2/28/07, Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
> I read the article by ESR,
> and agree that it was difficult to tell from his rant
> exactly what problem it was that he had encountered.
>
> Personally, I haven't found that yum has deteriorated
> in any way; it seems to me much better than
> the update program I used with the old RH distributions.
>
> I ran Ubuntu for a while recently
> (it was on a second-hand laptop I bought)
> and it didn't seem to me any better or worse
> than Fedora in this respect.
> I went back to Fedora because I was running that
> on other machines, and it seemed easier
> to run the same distribution on all.
>
> (What struck me forcibly was that there was
> much more difference between KDE an Gnome
> than there was between different distributions.)
>
> However, I do feel that the hostile reaction to ESR
> is counter-productive.
> One weakness as I see it with Fedora
> is that there is no mechanism for feedback.
> Nobody knows as far as I can see what problems people meet,
> unless they post bugzillas
> (which in my experience is a fairly useless exercise).
>
> While the documentation project is certainly a worthy aim
> it seems to me to have become excessively bureaucratic,
> with more discussion about the techniques of documentation
> than the actual content of the documents.
> (In my experience beautifully produced documents
> are if anything less likely to be helpful
> than the simplest of texts.)

I personally vote for a complaint/bitching list. This would centralise
all complaints, likely making it easier to notice the genuine ones
while cutting down that kind of noise on other lists.

-- 
Fedora Core 6 and proud