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."
The comments made about Redhat can be applied to many company supported projects. Now that is scary. It takes a lot more time to be "trusted" by a company than Open Source projects not run by companies. Funny, sad and scary.
We chase away enthusiastic supporters that can really help by not having a process which they can follow to get real access to these systems and make a difference.
Who the hell modded this funny?
A) The damn guy coppied and pasted it wrong. If you read the actual article, you'll see he reversed oss_crowd with rh_dev, which completely destroys the whole intention of the satire.
B) He just copied and pasted (wrongly) something from the article, with no additional input of his own! I'm not saying he's trolling, or creating flamebait, but come on! Maybe if he'd copied/pasted it correctly, and then added some of his own lines, a Funny moderation would be justified, but there's not a single word of his own authorship!
Please, mods, use some discression (and read the articles AND the comments you're moderating). Thanks.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
But Red Hat's disfocus/distraction in enabling true community involvement (beyond testing and packaging) hasn't kept them from cranking out an excellent distro in Fedora.
Slashdotters have to admit: Red Hat hasn't abandoned their non-paying users after all.
debian has no coherent release schedule
I know, it sucks. That's why I'm helping.
Are you helping?
try figuring out how to file a bug based on that--what exactly is debian unstable?
What? When you report bugs, the version of the package you're using is reported along with it. That is, if you're using the reportbug tool, which there's really no reason not to be doing. But really, the first thing you should be doing before reporting bugs is to upgrade. It's irresponsible to file bugs on old packages, especially if the new version already has fixed that bug.
One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.
What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code
Mozilla seemed to do it, though the reports I've heard seemed to indicate it was rough going at first. From the looks of the article, I'm just not sure how the project is part of the open source community. If Redhat doesn't want to spend the bucks to support Fedora, that's fine. If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.
I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.
Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.
I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.
As for doing everything myself, I don't know about most administrators, but I _hate_ running up2date, hate compiling new versions of software for bug-fixes, and I hate upgrading working production servers to a new version of an OS. Since RHEL solves all those problems rather nicely, it's a great choice.
AccountKiller
am i helping with debian? no. i am not using debian. i am not going to use debian if i can help it, so why would i help? i help by using distributions that get this right, thereby giving them larger market share.
.deb's, and yes i do sometimes need to file bugs against these behemoths.
as for filing bugs: maybe you are some kind of purist who thinks i should only be running software that i installed with apt-get, but last i checked things like WebLogic and Oracle did not come as free software
if i were at one of these corps. and i got a bug that says "doesn't work on debian unstable" i would toss it in the trash. i'm also not really interested in doing a lot of work finding every library they link in and sending that list to them, nor would that really help.
saying "it doesn't work on fedora core 2" means there is a high probability that they have in their QA lab a "fedora core 2" machine which they can try and replicate my bug on.
here is how i am helping debian, by providing some worthwhile advice: debian developers reading this, get a clue--give me a stable release version number system that i can use to report bugs.
given all my whining here you may simply say "debian may not be for you", and that was my exact conclusion as well.
Eh, whatever. I frankly couldn't care less how high my karma goes; I have many better things to do than posting on /., which is why I'm on here so rarely. I just don't feel like getting modded into the basement, because I do like the ability to post and be heard occasionally.
-Ed
Web Design & Software Development
I'll never understand this silly concept of "I want someone else to choose my packages!" Honestly. As a user of the Larry the Cow distro ;), I'm the exact opposite. I -don't- want to use it, much less have it installed, unless -I- am the one who decides it's needed/useful.
:P
On that note, who the heck cares about release cycles? Are you going to dump your installation only to reformat and use the newly packaged release? Surely you have more sanity than that. In which case you would merely use your package-updating tool (which you should do periodically anyway), regardles of if there's a "new release" or not. Bugfixes/updated packages come out all the time, regardless of "new releases", after all.
I'll go ahead and admit now that I mostly use linux on my servers. Rather, I don't really run anything that isn't (a server).
I don't know. "Home users". Ugh.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
Why does Panasonic (et al) make their own off brand? There are people who want the goods but not the assurance that comes with the brand. Fedora keeps people, at least to some degree, from going elsewhere. For home Fedora, but when an enterprise OS purchase comes along, they evangelize for the brand they know. If redhat killed off the freebies and didn't have an off brand to push people to, Suse, Mandrake, whatever would start looking better to a lot of people in a couple of years when it comes time to evangelise for that purchase.
At the same time they've got one important piece of information. Thing people will pay money to have addressed, and the realm of fedora where they get input on things people find mearly desireable.
...It would be funny if it weren't so painfully fucking accurate.
Welcome to 2004. Here's the rundown, incase you fell asleep:
o VA now pimps SourceForge as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. Go ahead, count the number of times you see the word "outsourcing" on their page. Thats right -- That lovely free hosting space your project has? Salesmen inside VA now point to projects like yours and go "See? It works! Now you can fire your employees, and replace them with this handy-dandy website!" They're making an example out of you. Wise up.
o Red Hat isn't interested in talking to you, looking at you, or hearing from you. Be sure to read the fine print at the bottom of the page..the part that reads "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc."....Those friendly folks at Red Hat just want you to keep the mill wheel turning, cranking out those security fixes and updates for them to sell. It's real simple. You grow the grain, cut it, and haul it all to the mill, where they'll bag it, and sell it, and let you go hungry. Now, in 2004, rather than being part of the business model, you are a distraction to the business model -- Sorry! No more Red Hat for you! (Fun Fact: They were making money off their end-user desktop distribution -- just not enough to justify listening to your noisy and distracting comments.)
Yaaay! Open source is GRRRREAT!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction all the time. To save face they never explain to outsiders (in this case, their constituency) how the high-level managers responsible have {impossible work constraints, petty political agendas, no idea}. If they were watched the way sports teams are, they might behave a little differently.
But as it is, so many companies seem incapable of simply choosing one competent and respected project manager, with a generally known and respected vision, and simply backing them for a twelve-month period. It's not like there aren't enough such people in the FLOSS community. But that's just not how business works, most of the time.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that (a) my tinfoil hat has some large pits and holes from the air corrosion here in NYC, and (b) I am but a bear of very little brain, and thus may not completely comprehend the astounding master plan of our new RedHat overlords... ...but it seems to me that if RedHat were organizing an astroturfing campaign for Fedora based around /. articles, they might, maybe, just possibly, do it by submitting stories that portrayed Fedora in a positive light, unlike this story?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
" ( apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages )"
So, I admin a lab with 50+ computers, and I configure them to download and install available updates nightly. As an admin, do you think I want to come in to work every morning and have to wonder what new bugs have cropped overnight? Sure, they'll probably be fixed by tomorrow, but what about all the users bugging me NOW?
If you seriously think that Debian Unstable is an alternative to Fedora, you need your head examined.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
After the Fedora deal, I switched all my servers to Debian stable (with a few packages from www.backports.org.) Debian unstable/testing is just not as nicely polished as Redhat for the desktop, so until some really slick looking Gnome/KDE defaults come to Debian testing or stable, or Userlinux actually happens, I have no compelling reason to switch desktops from Fedora. I am interested however, for the simple reason that I don't want to have to worry about managing two different distros for my servers and workstations.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
I have zero problem with that notion. We use Fedora on desktops/laptops as appropriate, and use RHEL on servers that warrant it.
And let's not forget, the projects that Red Hat picks to include in Fedora are getting a lot of user-facetime that helps them improve, independant of how it helps Red Hat. (Minus changes Red Hat makes to that software to make it work in their environment if required)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
(apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages)
RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?
Let me be the first to say I'm a big Debian fan. I use it on several computers. However, using Debian unstable on my main workstation for about a year was not the most pleasant experience. I don't remember everything, but I'll list a few of the more major annoyances:
1.) Some of us really don't want to download 20 (or over 100) packages, many of them the same update as last week, just to stay up to date with security holes.
2.) Though Debian fans love to say "just use unstable if you want the latest", Debian unstable is often _not_ faster than Fedora or Mandrake at getting the latest version of X, KDE, GNOME, or many other applications. IIRC, it took some time before Debian unstable got KDE 3. Yes, you can add additional sources (which I, actually, do with FC1 on my main workstation now to get the very latest KDE - kde-redhat)
3.) Debian Unstable is not the first priority of the Debian Security project. As such, I wouldn't trust a Debian unstable computer with any directly open ports to the internet, as even the latest "apt-get upgrade" may not fix security bugs that are fixed in Debian stable.
4.) At times, Debian unstable can truly be unstable. For a few weeks sometime last year (January?), KDE broke. A workaround was found a short while later, but it took a few weeks for the packages themselves to be fixed. Depending on what you have installed, Debian unstable can feel rather buggy.
All of this led me to install Debian stable on my computer last spring, which stayed until I got a new computer this February. I found that so long as I grabbed the latest KDE from kde.org's unofficial Debian packages, the system felt pretty new. However, I started to wish for a more updated feel with regards to fonts (which often look terrible in Debian, especially unstable, and I'm not the only one who couldn't quite figure out how to fix them). A more updated application set and the same ability to apt-get a bunch of packages made Fedora feel really nice on my new workstation. Fonts are beautiful, and the kde-redhat project does a nice job of packaging up the latest and greatest KDE. When I do apt-get upgrade, I often get some larger or non-essential upgrades, but it doesn't seem to be the quantity that I went through with Debian unstable. I didn't have to put much fuss into getting my system to look great _and_ have the niceties of the apt system.
I kept browsing the Debian-devel mailing list, hoping to see some sign of when we might see a new release, but some legal and technical issues seem to be pushing it back quite a ways. Therefore, I'm now a believer in the "Debian for the server" mentality. Never before has my desktop looked and functioned so cleanly, with OpenOffice now using some KDE widgets (thanks to the packaging from kde-redhat, I wouldn't have realized it was available otherwise). There was a strange problem with Mozilla in Debian where the occasional line of text would have part of the characters "shifted" a few pixels, which was very distracting. That made me switch to Konqueror way back when, and I still don't use Mozilla much at home - but it's nice to know that in Fedora the Mozilla fonts look great.
Sorry for the long rant, but I think I've got a decent perspective of one user who's tried both Debian unstable, stable, and Fedora on the desktop, and to me it just isn't worth the hassle to use Debian.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I can guarantee you they won't have the exact version of "debian unstable" you found your bug on.
Remember when I said you should update before filing bugs? This is why. Make a report with a current Debian distro, and developers will only have to update to get everything you have.
This not [just] a troll. Like many others I guess, I seriously wish the debian community would allocate a little more importance to shipping a current set of apps.
I'm about ready to give up on debian. I have already given up on RH/fedora as too commercial and schizo about the desktop. I used Mandrake for a while, but it was too buggy. p. Currently I'm helping out with Userlinux (yes I know its debian based!) and I hope this project doesn't let me down.
I think the previous author meant release critical bugs. Debian *will not* make a stable release until they are happy that there are no release critical bugs, and things work together. Of course there will be serious bugs and security compromises found--but that's why Debian does the security updates as well as point releases every few months or so.
Let's see Debian doesn't have to meet any ridgidly imposed deadlines, so they don't have to relase a shoddy product, and then quickly have to follow up their release with a slew of patches/service packs/errata. Show me a commerical software vendor that releases fresh packages that don't have a mile long patch list shortly after release. Our buddies at Microsoft? Nope, they always have a service pack shortly after release of a new product. RedHat...nope, same thing. Sun Microsystems? Well they still ship GNOME 1.4 with Solaris 9, so no, not exactly fresh.
Oh really? How so?
I personally work with a few Fortune 500 companies, and the thing they tell me they want over everything is stability, uptime and reliability. They do *NOT* want cutting edge. They will *NOT* install patches that haven't been out for at least two months, unless it's a patch for a bug they've encountered or a security update. And even then that patch has to be soaked and tested in their development environment for at least two weeks before it gets approved to be applied in their production environment. So if you work in an environment with any sort of real change control, just blindly applying updates is not acceptiable.
So, for a corporate setting, with real change control policies, Debian Stable makes perfect sense. It follows the same protocols that you would have from a true commerical vendor. Long release cycles, and security and bug fixes during the life of said re
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
For the sake of argument: If you, as a user or a developer, wanted a community-run distribution, why would you flock to Fedora, rather than using Debian or Gentoo or any of the other community-based distros?
I'm working in a company who moved to Fedora for the same reasons, but I can't say that being current particularly bothers me.
Fedora is more 'bleeding edge' than Debian, but thats also a way of saying it's 'less stale'. Its not as bleeding edge as the Test series of Fedora which have had some odd problems.
We've been running Core 1 since it came out, in over 50 machines. We havn't had a single kernel panic or software component failure in any of them.
How do we manage it? We have a local mirror of the Fedora Core distribution, and we also mirror the updates. We don't integrate the updates into our distribution until we've tested them - unless they are trivial and not likely to cause a major problem.
So, for most applications, like webservers and mailservers, I don't see what the issue is. Fedora isn't any less 'stable' than any other distribution. Who is to say that staying up to date is more or less stable than having 2-3 year old code that is only patched to fix specific, known vulnerabilities?
With no actual evidence of a problem, its hard to know if there is a problem or not. If we see evidence of Fedora being unstable, or unsafe to use, then we'll re-evaluate the situation - but right now Fedora is doing everything we need to to do and more.