Slashdot Mirror
Revealed: How Fedora And The Community Interact
bakwas_internet writes "Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny
message in form of a irc chat log, revealing how Fedora and the Community Interact, to the development discussions mailing list related to Fedora Core.The story also appeared at lwn.net
and OSnews."
Okay, only mark your diaries if you are Fedora inclined like me ;)
Fedora Core 2, if on schedule (which, AFAIK it still is) is due to be available from mirrors on the 17th of this month.
The actual distibution is sceduled to start going out to the mirrors on the 14th but I think the mirrors will be requested to keep it locked till the 17th.
If they don't make it to the release deadline it may lead to some IRC antics rather like the ones mentioned in the article.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Great demonstration of the relationship. For real hilarious excerpts from IRC, try http://www.bash.org
(Warning: Some quotes may contain questionable content.)
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Color HTML-ized version
He didn't reverse them. Perhaps you should read the article again, and note how most speakers are directing what they say (a common IRC tactic). When it was copied and pasted and posted, the browser is seeing the nick in the angle brackets and thinking "Oh! Mis-formed HTML! I'll ignore that!" and not showing the nick of the speaker. A common mistake. Specifying "Code" as the post type for the slashdot comment allows the nick to remain:
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what can we do to help with Red Hat Project?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: didn't we always do that?
<rh_sales> hey, all, if you really want a stable system, don't use
fedora project. It will eat your brane. Buy RHEL instead.
<rh_dev> rh_sales: stfu
--- rh_pr removes voice from rh_sales
RH Fedora is a success with respect to #1, but has failed at #2. I run RH Fedora and it seems to be a reasonable stable and up-to-date distro, and tries out features like SELinux. As other people have pointed out, FC2 is on target and should be released soon.
But as far as #2 goes it is a failure. There has been no integration with Fedora.us and, as the dialogue shows, RH still decides on all the packages and defaults in a relatively closed way.
Some people have asked why RH, being a for-profit company, could open up development. There seems to be an obvious answer: so the community could help it more. RedHat could still exercise a high degree of control as long as it contributed heavily to the new community project. That's why many people were excited at the new structure---it implied that RH was still committed to develop the distribution, but would make sure that the community was heavily involved as well. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth their effort to "open it up."
I've been using Fedora since day 1, and quite honestly I love it. I haven't played with the pre-release Core 2 stuff yet, but Core 1 runs like a dream.
As far as the interaction with Red Hat, think about it this way: What other distro allows you to post a message to a mailing list and get an answer from Alan Cox himself? Red Hat genuinely interacts with the users, listens to them and tries to help them.
I can't even count how many times I have seen the Red Hat guys help users who clearly aren't running any of their Enterprise products.
Sure there aren't droves of people using it yet but that's because a lot of people haven't even left Redhat 7.3 yet.
Fedora is an easy to use (especially after adding apt) stable distro. It has some backing from Redhat so my employer likes it. I don't do distro politics, I use what works for me.
The Anti-Blog
Basically, it comes down to this (which I've been steadily posting in every Fedora/RH story since the whole fiasco started):
.NET was for Microsoft -- unclear, confusing, had far too many things under one name, and ended up being kind of nice but not all that astounding.
* Fedora originally was a third-party project to package lots of software for Red Hat. Red Hat decided to add a bunch of Fedora's packages into their mainstream repository. This is the complete and total extent of how users have been affected by Fedora. More packages.
* Red Hat's salespeople apparently (and in retrospect, quite unfortunately) decided that it would be a really opportune time to try to get some money by telling business people that the merged Fedora/Red Hat wasn't particularly stable or reliable. In reality, the merged Fedora is exactly the same as RH 9 and previous releases. Mass Slashdot confusion ensues, and a number of people who dislike RH for one reason or another (distro grudges, etc) promptly propagate and distort this.
* The original Fedora announcement contained a lot of references to how the merged Fedora was community-driven. In reality, not a whole lot was changed. You can still submit bugs, test packages, submit patches and the like -- but you could do all that before.
* The original Fedora respositories (found on fedora.us) are still up, and being updated, and are not always the same as the Red Hat merged Fedora repositories. This causes a great deal of confusions (especially since people mirroring the repositories may be mirroring one or the other).
Basically, the merging of Fedora was a good idea technically (merge a bunch of well-made packages into mainstream Red Hat) that was completely and utterly mishandled from a PR point of view. It was tied to attempts from various RH people to move people to RHEL, to differentiate RHEL from RH/Fedora, and to involve more people in the project. It's kind of like
If I were RH, I'd get the fedora.us repositories synced up *now* *permanently* (or work out a name change or something). I'd release a press release describing the whole situation so that there's *finally* an authoritative document so that the 90% of folks out there that are confused by the complicated situation have a single source to be pointed to.
Seriously, RH does some great engineering work, but SuSE seems to be a hell of a lot more competent when it comes to doing business deals and presenting a solid image. Someone up at Red Hat needs to grab the damn reins and tell the Fedora integration people and the PR people to have a consistent story and to clarify things for users. I can very definitely say that the rampant speculation and ongoing uncertainty is a Bad Thing for Red Hat.
Here's the situation from an outsider's point of view:
* RHEL is a "production server" distro. It has one major selling point -- it is infrequently updated. This wouldn't work very well for most Linux users (Linux people tend to want the latest-and-greatest), but it's awfully nice if you don't want to hassle with upgrading your system every six months. This is a pretty decent reason to purchase the system. It's kinda like Debian stable -- a cross between a slower-moving OS like OpenBSD and the more rapidly-changing Linux.
* Fedora is not unstable or flaky or beta or development any more than the earlier RH releases were. It is quite usable for "serious" work. However, it is updated more frequently than RHEL, and has a shorter EOL.
May we never see th