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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.
Apparently one of the results of this summit is the dropping of all support for past versions of Fedora Core prior to FC4, as a note on fedoralegacy.org said this past week.
I agree that we can't support all the versions in perpetuity, but I thought it would have been more helpful if they had included some reason other than "sorry, we just can't do it anymore". Did it not fit into the big picture of their support? What about future security fixes? etc. etc. As it was, it was very abrupt.
This applies to the majority of my Linux-using friends as well. Perhaps this is because people already know the name of Red Hat
I think this was definitely the norm about 3 years ago when it was created. Certainly, before that, Red Hat had incredible name recognition, and as it result, most new Linux users tended to get Red Hat (sometimes even get retail copies at the time).
However, I would claim that Ubuntu has now usurped Red Hat's (and Fedora's) position as the most recognized distribution among Linux newbies. Certainly Distro Watch agrees with me. Not that DW is conclusive evidence, but it tends to be a good indicator.
I do agree with you though; Fedora is important, even if it is not quite as popular as Ubuntu among newbies.
It has never set out to be a user oriented system. It only exists to push the envelope. If you choose to use it in any of its incarnations, you have to accept that. Otherwise, install RHEL or Ubuntu.
And no, that wasn't meant as a flame, it's the truth. Is Ubuntu based on Debian unstable, is RHEL based on FC6 ?Yep. Which is why it's pretty much Number One on the hitlist for the new Fedora Infrastructure chief.
"You won't be missed you corporate-enabling proprietary garbage"
I think you fundamentally missed the point of fedora there. Fedora is 100% free, so much so that it doesn't ship with mp3 or DVD support. It's a small hastle but it's the price of freedom... so not really proprietary
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I've installed many bad RPMs (admittedly, mostly prior to RPM v4, but I jumped ship to Debian-based distros around that time) that have destroyed the entire configuration to the point where no dependencies resolve correctly any more. All of the responses I've heard about this sort of behaviour are something to the effect of "use the source RPM then", or whatever. The point being, things need to be painless. Sure, I could debug the RPM database (occasionally I had success in sorting out what went wrong), but it's a nightmare to try and use RPM to install proprietary software. You almost always have to force the installation using --no-deps --force, because RPM binaries are usually targeted at a specific distro/version. I remember mysql had big problems too, and Red Hat wouldn't upgrade from 3.23 for an unreasonably long time. Oracle had problems, again with dependencies. The list goes on and on. I also started using Red Hat around version 4. I've got plenty of bad experience with them, believe me. I've also got some measure of experience with every one of the alternative distros I mentioned, and have good and bad things to say about all of them.
Debian takes a somewhat draconic approach to package management, simply refusing any further package installation until you resolve the dependencies. I've never seen distro-specific .debs, just one. There weren't many of them until Ubuntu got big, but you can find anything (including proprietary, non-GPL software) packaged in Multiverse. I've installed software from all sorts of different sources, and I've never had to debug the installation from the command line, which is the entire point of the exercise, isn't it? I don't mind the inflexible nature of this package management. After all, it is the authoritative packing list for your OS. I kinda want it to be accurate, for auditing purposes.
Maybe you just need some more Fedora experience.
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
No. All binaries are targeted that way. When you run
Binary compatibility is hard.
The "--force" switch tells RPM, "I know you think this is a bad idea. I say I know otherwise. Do it anyway". You can't then turn around and complain that things broke when you did that. RPM took your word for it when you said you knew better. If you didn't know better, that's your own damn fault, not RPM's.
Put more briefly: If you think you need to use --force, you're almost certainly wrong.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.