Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Liam Proven]

On 22 March 2014 12:04, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> I see no point in all Linux OSs trying to be /that/, let Ubuntu fill
> that role, and Fedora fill its own.  Nor is their any point in all
> Linuxes being the same as each other.  I use Linux, and Fedora Linux,
> because I don't want to use Windows.  I don't want anything that's like
> it, in behaviour, nor looks.

Agreed. /But/ it's damned handy if something works on all hardware
that Windows supports, understands Windows filesystems and network
protocols and file formats and so on. Be careful not to throw out the
baby with the bathwater.

> People seem to harp on about success by being the leader of the bunch,
> and only that measure.  Whereas being successful is really being able to
> carry on doing what you want to.  If Fedora can be Fedora, and people
> want to use it, then it's succeeded.  It's not a commercial product,
> don't judge it by commercial measures.

Agreed again - /but/ I think that there are questions which could be
profitably asked.

E.g. some third-party .deb packages can be installed on various
versions of Ubuntu, all the Ubuntu remixes official and unofficial,
and even on Debian itself. This is not universally the case, but .deb
always means apt or something on top of apt, such as aptitude, and
.deb packages are very portable across the Debian universe.

The same is /not/ true of RPM. RHEL and Fedora use one
meta-package-manager, SUSE uses a different one, Mandriva and Mageia
use a different one again. You can't install SUSE packages on non-SUSE
distros that use RPM, and you can't install RH RPMs on non-RH distros.

There is a lot of infighting among RPM distros - it probably is not
perceived as such outside the RH world, but that is how it looks from
elsewhere. There are even forks of RPM itself - e.g. http://rpm5.org/

I don't know but I bet that online repository formats are incompatible, too.

This kind of thing is an issue, and unless or until it's fixed, the
Debian family will hold an upper hand there.

 --
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