Fedora Holds Summit To Map Its Future

lisah writes "Last month members of the Fedora community met for a three-day summit (wiki here) designed to chart a course for future version releases as well as to plan other Fedora projects. Team members say they want to leverage the enthusiasm of a community that has demonstrated a willingness to develop Fedora Extras (add-on features to the Core package) and support Fedora Legacy (past releases). Red Hat's community development manager, Greg DeKoenigsberg, said, 'Community contributors have proven conclusively over the past 18 months that they can build packages every bit as well as Red Hat engineers — better, in some cases.' In addition to creating several proposals that will be introduced the the community for input and feedback, the summit also gave rise to the newly-created position of Fedora Infrastructure Leader." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Comments

Re:Fedora Legacy Dropped

[qortra]

Fedora has never been considered a system that was appropriate for deployment. I always viewed it as kind of a Debian Unstable or Testing (if you will) to Red Hat's RHEL (which is similar in function to Debian Stable). If I had authority in the Fedora Community, I wouldn't vote for legacy support either. Fedora's claim to fame has always been its ability to quickly adopt bleeding-edge software. It was terribly concerned with stability (or even security).

Re:Fedora is important

[mandelbr0t]

Even though I have switched distributions, it it possible that I may have stopped using Linux if I had come to the conclusion that Fedora was of too poor quality to use on a daily basis.

It's not?

Seriously though, I've never like Red Hat Linux. RPM doesn't work very well, and there were countless bugs in Red Hat versions of packages that didn't appear in the original source. Not to mention the configuration scripts that didn't work, or had problems. Don't forget the graphical auto-updater that hung and/or crashed on more than 5 packages at a time. I've never needed Enterprise support for any of my servers, so I can't speak to that. However, it's the only possible offering Red Hat could have that would be of any value.

The Fedora project was a disaster, IMO. They used it as a platform to find critical bugs in the code they wanted to use for the RHEL product. The quote I find most memorable about Red Hat (though not specific to Fedora, that's my own experience) was "Red Hat likes to live on the bleeding edge, and leave the bleeding to you". As a result of such experience, I turned away from the Red Hat distros.

Red Hat is important in only one way, from what I can see: they make Linux a commercial venture. Other than SCO, I don't think anybody has done a worse job from that perspective, either. Ximian, eventually bought by Novell, at least contributed to the development of Evolution and other GNOME software. Corel got into the Office for Linux market at a time when the biggest complaint about Linux was that there were no good applications available. IBM has contributed to the idea of commercial Linux more than anyone I can think of, both in terms of GPL-ed contributions to the codebase, and as a vendor promoting Linux-based solutions. Red Hat has been a purely profit-based venture, sacrificing the quality of the free distribution to make a few extra bucks.

So, yes, the concept of Fedora is important: free binary packages that the community can install relatively painlessly, with source available for those who want to debug and contribute themselves. There's also a place for the community to discuss the product and difficulties they're having with it. Of course, that's what Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and many others also do. The Red Hat implementation, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

mandelbr0t