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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?
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.
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?
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.
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?"
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!
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 ?