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 is important

[slapys]

Fedora was the first Linux operating system I ever used. This applies to the majority of my Linux-using friends as well. Perhaps this is because people already know the name of Red Hat, and discover Fedora as a result. In any case, the quality of Fedora is significant because it determines the first impression of Linux on many people. 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.

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:Fedora is important

[psykocrime]

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.

Right, because Red Hat has never contributed anything to the community:

http://sources.redhat.com/projects.html

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

Fedora isn't perfect, and RH did make - IMO - do a poor job of transitioning from the "old" RHL series to Fedora, but to suggest that they don't
contribute anything to Linux and OSS is just ridiculous.

Good ideas

[grub]

Makes sense that they plan their future. Pre-arranged funerals can ease the burdon on the survivors.

Oh wait, this isn't about BSD?

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.

No mention of users

[Intron]

All of the planning described in the article seemed to be oriented on how to best support developers. I didn't see anything about end user goals.

Re:No mention of users

[eln]

Also, with open source software, the line between developers and users is very thin.

Not really. The developers are the guys who write the code, and the users are the ones who bitch about it. Same as any other piece of software.

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:No mention of users

[RAMMS EIN]

``Not really. The developers are the guys who write the code, and the users are the ones who bitch about it. Same as any other piece of software.''

While that's true to an extent, there are two things that make open source software different from the norm:

1. Many developers write the software for their own use (rather than for money)
2. Users can and do change the software to better suit them

This is what blurs the line between developers and users. Of course, both of these are also reasons why developers can and do ignore users' requests, and get away with it.

High time to stop duplication

[namityadav]

I think the first objective for all the Open Source teams should be to stop duplication. A lot of our resources are wasted in getting features ported from other applications and (Even worse) redoing features on different applications (Because of underlying differences). I know that one of the strengths of Open Source is to have "choices", but some of these choices are just plain silly. I am not asking for these choices to go away completely. But there should be at least some sort of coherence between different alternatives (They already have some coherence, thanks to the Kernel .. but we need to see a lot more of the same in more higher level applications too)

Imagine how much more work could be done to a package manager if every distro was using the same. Imagine how good OpenOffice and KOffice could have been if there were not 200 other Open Source alternatives. I am glad to hear about efforts to unify KDE and Gnome. We need to focus on something similar for a lot of other applications too. And this should be one of the top most priorities for Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu/Debian teams.

OSS and natural selection...

[Junta]

Forks/duplications of efforts can have negative repercussions, but they are not without reason. A fork reflects a difference of opinion on how to proceed. Duplication of work occurs on similar goals, but one of two things happen. Either the reason behind the fork was not really popular or not sufficiently different to pursuade userbase and the fork dies, or the cause for the work was justified and the fork lives on or overtakes the original.

Can probably point out tons and tons of failed forks (I believe mplayer has had a few unsuccessful forking attempts). They happen all the time.

A shining example of a 'fork' like endeavor coexisting with the original is Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a set of technical and marketing goals that didn't mesh perfectly with Debian. Ubuntu was justified and the community has greatly accepted it. Meanwhile Debian has not really lost much in its userbase (most Ubuntu users come from RPM based distros rather than Debian) because the concepts Debian hold as important still matter.

And sometimes fork reflect the need to meaningfully continue a project that has for all intents and purposes lost touch. Xorg is a fork of XFree86 that has effectively killed off the original. They still twitch, but they've even taking down their ultimately embarassingly list of distros that still supported them (generally by not having updated yet rather than a concious future decision). The breaking point was a licensing technicality, but it's clear that XFree86 had technical problems as well in adopting new graphical features.

Hell, linux itself is spiritually (not technically) a fork of minix. The basic point is simple, projects by and large once established tend not to do revolutionary new things as the people at the head are heading basically where they meant to go. Forking is a logical way for revolutionary change to happen and the userbase decides the fate of the original and new.

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.