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."

Comments

Funny and scarry

[oo_waratah]

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.

Re:Funny and scarry

[Nermal]

Basically (and this is all explained in the follow-ups to the referenced post and elsewhere in that thread) there are people at RH who are working on setting up community CVS access but getting the machine, the space, the access and devising policies to prevent stuff that could get RH in trouble from being committed, etc is taking a frustratingly long time.

By way of disclaimer, I am an "RH person", but I don't have anything to do with the Fedora and am no more or less informed on the matter than any other reader of Fedora-devel, but here's the short version as I understand it:

The IRC log is funny and probably accurate, but it doesn't give credit to the people at Red Hat who really are trying to make community involvement feasable and doesn't take into account all of the extra red tape (much of it nescessary) involved in doing this within a corporate structure.

Re:Score +5

[schwaang]

The funny message is so true.

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.

Re:Ditch Fedora - Go Debian Unstable

[proxima]

(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.