Fedora Core 6 HUGE problem - Binary drivers.

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 12:50:56 -0500,
  Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It is more a question of _who_ should deal with the problems created by 
> the inability or refusal of the kernel developers to define a driver 
> interface. In the 'enterprise' release the distro packagers handle it 
> and the users win.  In fedora the users lose.

I am going to lose either way, but prefer Fedora's way where I know what
the deal is up front, rather than getting burnt down the road.

> Users lose either of these ways.  The first question is why does anyone 
> who has a working kernel and device drivers _ever_ need to install a 
> behavior-changing replacement - and particularly within an FCx release 

When they want a feature in the new kernel. Features I am personally looking
forward to is the removal of the limit of arguments to exec and dmcrypt
getting write barrier support back.

> where the next one is only months away? If there is an answer to that 

Your assuming that there will be an nVidia driver for the next Fedora release.
That isn't necessary going to be the case.

> question, then the next one becomes how to make yum understand kernel 
> module dependencies and schedule kernel updates only after all needed 
> modules (i.e. currently loaded in your kernel) are available in the 
> repositories so you at least have fewer unpleasant surprises.

Getting this to work better is an admirable goal, but the dependencies will
probably need to be from the third party kernel modules on a specific
kernel version.

> Perhaps - but things are different now that users have other choices.  I 
> think it's fedora's - and eventually RH's problem if users are forced to 
> a distro that uses different packaging and admin techniques to get a 
> usable desktop.   Fedora tends to be usable in this respect at or near 
> the end of its life cycle, but then quickly becomes unusable due to the 
> ending of security updates.

I think trying to make Fedora for everyone is a mistake. It's current missions
of using all free software (now including build tools, making it almost a
source based distro) and keeping up with very recent versions of software
included fits what I want very well. It isn't a no headache system though.
For people admining their own system that want something that just works,
Ubuntu seems to be the system of choice these days.