Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Les Mikesell]

Lamar Owen wrote:

> Having done significant testing on Ubuntu (primarily because of the superior 
> software repository and lack of the 'mixing' issues), and having done some 
> support of 'ordinary' users on Ubuntu, let me say this:  when it comes to the 
> kernel interfaces, Ubuntu suffers the same fate as Fedora does.  Have to do 
> that same things if you want to run VMware, for instance.  The kernel 
> interface issue is upstream, and any distribution tracking 2.6 is going to 
> have unstable kernel API's. It is not a Fedora disease; it is a kernel 
> development process disease, and it's broken.

Have you looked at any of the OpenSolaris distributions with GNU 
userland like Nexenta yet?  I think they are too new to think about 
stability yet, but Solaris has a remarkable history of maintaining 
backwards compatibily more or less forever, so it seems promising.

> The decision to drop having a stable, security-updated, kernel line stinks.  
> If you run a CentOS or RHEL base, you are going to have a stable kernel with 
> security updates, backported by Red Hat.  But, you know, I've had a few 
> issues even there, where a kernel update did weird things (like reorder 
> NIC's,

Which is just incredibly painful when most of your servers are in remote 
  colo sites and you expect to be able to connect with ssh after a 
reboot...  How is it even possible not to consider that situation?

> remove support for an older RAID controller, etc).  Reading the 
> release notes and changelog isn't even enough for some of these patches; one 
> must in some cases track the actual source RPM patchsets and changes, on 
> certain hardware.  At least the VMware binary modules drop in happily without 
> a recompile.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com