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Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal
Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
odd, it was my understanding that GPL'ed software was supposed to be used, not just by a few. I do understand his concern that Canonical and others should be contributing more useful software to the code base that is available but whining every time some distro uses the code that is available, adds to it and becomes popular is very very un-productive.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yes. Shuttleworth would benefit from synchronized releases. If there wasn't some advantage for his project, he wouldn't have suggested it. What he's suggesting is that everyone else would benefit too.
Sure, Red Hat puts a lot of effort into hardware support backports. But if Ubuntu, Debian, Novel and Red Hat all standardized on the same kernel releases for their six-month release cycles then hardware vendors would have one platform to target instead of four. That might very well increase vendor cooperation - even to a sufficient extent that Red Hat would get better hardware support than they have now with less investment.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?
Who is Wieers?
What did Shuttleworth propose?
Why he would propose it is sort of the point. RTFA.
I don't think it is a big stink. In fact it seems a rather well thought out bit of analysis.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Right now the landscape for various projects is really a mess. Everyone kind of has their own release schedule and it's different for every project - and for good reason: we're doing this on our own time and therefore why should we care about ship dates?
Well, realistically we do. If projects knew that every May and every November there'd be major distro releases, they'd probably do a good job of freezing their trees in January and July to prepare point releases aimed at being relatively stable.
In turn, there'd be a nice set of releases that Red Hat could pick from and decrease their QA. Otherwise, it's kind of scattershot what the condition of various projects' trees are in.
----- obSig
Dag Wieers is known to just about every user of RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, because he and a few other people provide a ton of 3rd part packages that make life more bearable. See:http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages.php
He's also one of the people behind rpmforge, which tries to make a unified repo of 3rd party add-on packages. Previously there were a number of incompatible (dependencies and so forth) repositories like atrpms. Dag's work benefits all of us who use RHEL on a regular basis.
I'm assuming that Shuttleworth proposed that every enterprise distro synchronize the release versions of certain core packages like glibc, mysql, gcc, etc, so that it will be easier for vendors to target linux distros with their software releases. In theory it's a good idea, but not everyone has the same idea of what's important and what the right version to release is.
I don't think he needs to be playing devil's advocate. I think what he's saying makes a lot of sense.
When an enterprise buys new hardware, they want the software to "just work" on it. It would be expensive for them to do the work themselves, so they are happy to pay someone else to do it. This is the value-added service that Red Hat gives. This is what an enterprise pays for.
It would be ludicrous to give your *competitor* this service for free *before* you give it to your customer. Sure, once you do the work, others can benefit -- that's part and parcel of free software. But you are allowed (I'm going to even say *expected*) to charge for your services.
Because Canonical and Red Hat are going after the same market, it is inevitable that there will be some overlap of effort. If Canonical wishes to use the work that Red Hat does, they merely have to wait until Red Hat releases.
But what worries me more here is that Canonical seems to miss the point where *creating a working distribution* is a money making opportunity. They seem to see it as a loss leader and they will charge for "support"; where "support" means hand-holding the user. Perhaps I'm wrong. I really hope I am.
Until companies understand that providing solutions and creating capability is the service where all the money is, we're not going to see the explosive growth in Free software that I'm hoping for. I had hoped that Canonical understood this. I still hope it's true, but I'm less optimistic.
Das Wiener! Sorry it's late.
then what Shuttleworth is suggesting is the idea of seasons. If everyone can get on the same page a couple times a year, the rest of the time they can go do their migration, vacationing, rewrites, refactoring, day-jobs, etc. If it makes sense for mother nature, it might just make sense for our software ecosystem.
Emergent cooperation FTW!
I don't think this level of laziness should be encouraged
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Here is Mark Shuttleworth's insightful response when I asked him, "Why would Red Hat cooperate with Ubuntu, especially now that Ubuntu also has its sights set on the server market. Don't they consider Ubuntu a threat?"
He's also one of the people behind rpmforge, which tries to make a unified repo of 3rd party add-on packages. Previously there were a number of incompatible (dependencies and so forth) repositories like atrpms. Dag's work benefits all of us who use RHEL on a regular basis.
You forgot to mention that the whole reason that there is an rpmforge is that Dag and co. refuse to operate under EPEL / Fedora's rule: Don't introduce packages that are already in the main repository. As a result, Dag's archive and rpmforge will conflict with the base distribution or EPEL on some packages. Once in a while, I'll grab a spec from Dag and rebuild packages for RHEL/CentOS, but as a matter of policy I don't allow rpmforge repositories to be added to any of my systems. His work does make my life easier. Technically. From time to time. However, suggesting that there are no longer incompatible repositories gives him too much credit, I think.
From my point of view only Ubuntu would benefit from such a synchronized release schedule. Well, I guess then it's best that they change their release cycle to Red Hat's. That's not too difficult to achieve as RH announced its schedules quite early.
So if you want free beer - go and get it yourself!
Novells SLES and SLED are released every 18 months. openSUSE is released every 8 months.
Also SLES and SLED are maintained 7 years.
Does this mean manpower? Yes, especialy for the parts of the distribution where no updates are provided anymore. e.g. where the production has completely halted. This has to be maintained by Novell themselves. Just download the source if you so desire and you can copy and paste it into your own code.
How do they do it, except for editing the code? https://build.opensuse.org/. Hey Mark, if you like, you can download it and put your distributions on it, letting the community handle the security updates. It is able to build complete distributions, so you can then build them as often as you desire. Yes, it handles Ubuntu as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
well ... as one of the lead developers for CentOS, let me tell you that Dag is MUCH more CentOS friendly than EPEL.
Users are free to choose which repositories to use ... BUT ... don't confuse Red Hat's corporate interest with good policy. EPEL does not put conflicting packages in EPEL because Red Hat will not allow it and not for any other reason. This isn't bad, CentOS would not exist without Red Hat ... you mischaracterize this issue. Also, RPMFOrge and ATRPMS existed for years before EPEL started, and in fact the reason Dag and other are not members are because EPEL demanded that all the current groups in this space stop what they were doing and instead do what Fedora determined was the proper course.
Also ... there is a package called yum-priorities that allows you to prevent having core packages updated if you want to take that approach.
The CentOS Project supports Dag's (and ATRPMS as well) in their forming of a new 3rd party repo called rpmrepo .
What you fail to mention is that RPMforge predates Fedora and EPEL by a few years. Between 2002 and 2007 (EPEL) I attracted millions of users using my RPM packages. Packages that existed *before* Fedora came into play. Repositories did not exist back then in the RHEL/Fedora world as they exist today.
When Fedora started I was very interested to help out (read those lists), but nobody within Fedora cared about the millions of Fedora/CentOS/RHEL users I provide packages to and Fedora Extras did not want to support the RHEL/CentOS users at the conception.
Only in 2007 they started to care about RHEL/CentOS users, mostly because Fedora itself is using CentOS for their infrastructure. At that time the Fedora packages were already incompatible with RPMforge packages.
So tell me, what did *I* do wrong here, except caring for my userbase where Fedora didn't.
If the Fedora project wants compatibility, why are they expecting the work to be done by 2 individuals ? I certainly cannot spend that extra effort.
Correction: I am a sock puppet for CentOS :)
But seriously, one cannot have his own opinion anymore ?
I have Fedora on one system because it handles one scenario more easily than Ubuntu, x86_64 having to install third-party 32-bit software. Other than that, the system is frustrating:
-Their 'releases' seem to mean little. They don't stick to the major revisions of software (Fedroa 8 box updated kernel to 2.6.24 and pidgin to 2.4 for example). As a result, third party drivers can exhibit different glitches or not work at all even during a routine update. Pidgin changed its UI and initially started crashing for me a lot when they went to 2.4. No matter what Fedora path you take, you are submitted to the bleeding edge across the board, not just the areas you are intrinsically interested in.
-They have no interest in helping users have a convenient time with binary software. I.e. annoying to install flash, nvidia, or ati binary drivers. It's one thing of the OSS alternatives are remotely comparable, but they simply are not at this point. ath5k when first adopted was no where near good enough for common usage. The nv driver is a waste of paying the nVidia premium. Ditto for the open source ATI driver until those efforts see fruition. And the open-source implementation of flash is getting closer, but is still far removed from a viable alternative.
All in all, Fedora feels to an extent like crippleware and a rolling beta. Knowing explicitly that as a user you are little more than a free tester for RedHat's for-profit endeavor is annoying. If I were interested in a specific major increase of a package such that I didn't want to wait a few months for the next distro rev, I'd download it myself.
Ubuntu's releases are not perfect (the hardy scheduler annoyance a good example), but the complaints are far less severe and I know when an update might require work. I'm too lazy to have to deal with a major change at a random time. It's the reason why I stopped using Gentoo after a couple of years.
Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.
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