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

Fedora Legacy Dropped

[Vexler]

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.

Re:Fedora Legacy Dropped

[Kelson]

Just to clarify, "the people running the project" in this case means "the people running the Fedora Legacy project."

Random Rule of Slashdot #843: The one time you don't use Preview will be the one time you should have.

Re:Fedora Legacy Dropped

[uglyduckling]

see, the way i see it, if you have time to migrate to another distro, you have time to migrate to the newer release of the same distro, but with less pain

The LTS bit of Ubuntu LTS means 'long term support' (sorry if you knew this). Presumably the parent's point is that he can switch to Ubuntu once and have 5 years guaranteed support for the server version, wheras upgrading to the newer Fedora/RH offering gives no certainty as to how long support will last. It's not always non-trivial to upgrade to a newer release, so if he/she is going to do it then they should do it once and stick with the distro for a few years.

Re:Fedora is important

[qortra]

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.

Re:No mention of users

[smoker2]

Fedora is all about developers because it is all about development

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 ?

Re:Fedora's imminent death

[joe 155]

"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

Your error is not RPM's fault

[DragonHawk]

You almost always have to force the installation using --no-deps --force, because RPM binaries are usually targeted at a specific distro/version.

No. All binaries are targeted that way. When you run ./configure, it runs through a bunch of checks to figure out where things are and how they are configured, for all of the dependencies. And "dependencies" includes everything from special-purpose libraries to glibc and the kernel. It includes all the configure options, source defines, patches, compiler switches, and anything else that changes the configuration of the binary. RPM keeps track of all that stuff because that's the only way to be sure it will work. If you change any of it, sure, the resulting binary *might* *appear* to work, but it might just as easily segfault.

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.