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Fedora Project Developer Proposes Layered, More Agile Design to Distribution
Karrde712 continues, Discussion on the list has questioned whether this is meant to be a return to the old "Fedora Core" and "Fedora Extras" model of Fedora's early life, to which Miller responded: 'I'm aware of this concern — I was there too, you know. As I was talking about the idea with people, it kept being hard to not accidentally say "core". Finally, as I was talking to Seth Vidal, he said, in his characteristic way, "Look, here's the thing. You should just call it Fedora Core. If you don't, people are going to be grumbling in the back corner and saying that it's really Core, and the conversation becomes about a conspiracy about the name. Just call it Fedora Core, and then have the conversation about the important point, which is how it's different."'
I pretty much left the software development world when all this "Agile" bullshit became popular.
Over the past decade there has been an explosion of methodologies and metrics to coincide with a stagnation in fundamental developments in engineering. Contrary to what the young'uns think, there is very little that's appeared on the software scene that wasn't already there - and written more efficiently - either on the desktop in the '90s, or on the mainframe/cloud in the two decades prior. But what we do have is a whole pile of paperwork, of admin, of things to remember about how you're supposed to be doing things, of new ways to make creativity just that little bit harder.
So there is an *explosion* on all the new platforms of very similar software products, all developed the same way.
Stop it. Find out what works in your organisation, and evolve incrementally. Don't look to claims of revolutionary buzzwords.
If you're concerned about packaging you're in marketing not software development, why not just spend hours talking about the colour of the box and be done with it. This is one of the reasons why debian is making inroads into the enterprise space. Less colour and more bang. Once many years ago I thought that Debian wasn't for business use and only redhat was a contender in this space and I fought hard to standardize on this supported model. Since then the packaging quality of debian has demonstrated its robustness and redhat has been focusing on other things.
Seems to me that when I'm working on a build with security in mind, I start with a bare build that is the barest of essentials to boot the system and use the hardware. From then, we add on the packages we need to get just what we need. And as we layer those packages on, we focus on the hardening of the individual services. As time has gone on, in a virtualized environment, it's very easy to build "default" systems that fill certain roles and are sized for different resource levels. It would seem to me that these standardized baselines would serve well for an installation model. Fedora does that to some extent (loosely) but that could be built upon more I would think. So if I want a firewall, I could get a bare boned installation with enhanced iptables rules and hardening provisions commonly used. Or if I want a web server, perhaps a slightly less bareboned installation with the needed scripting tools (PHP, Perl, etc?), etc... It seems the biggest questions I've dealt with when building new systems is, role, size, and whether or not it's for development. Outside of that, the builds are rather typical.
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It was Fedora Core when it first replaced the Red Hat regular distro... The Core was dropped a few years ago, now it is coming back as something *New and improved*.
In order to get Linux growing is a similar thing. ...
A "ring0" with a very basic system on top of which all other distros are based.
This would avoid everyone re-inventing the warm water multiple times, while distros would focus on the other rings.
More or less the same as is seen in FreeBSD with the "GIU"derivatives.
A controlled ring0 would focus on keeping the system up and running at the very best with a centralized repo for everyone.
But you may say i am a dreamer
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
From TFA, their goal seems to be to:
- Add more layers
- Add more dependencies
- Reduce compatibility
- Make the distro more "exciting"
It would be hard to imagine a better recipe for epic failure. It seems that the proponents don't realize that the less baggage it carries, the more robust and easy to use a distro becomes.
And "excitement" is definitely not needed. An operating system isn't an electrical appliance needing new excitement and frills to shift product off the shelves each season. Boredom is a sign of stability and reliability, and those two are without doubt most important features a distro designer can provide.
Fedora being a "bag of bits" wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as it was one of the distros more focused on out-of-the-box functionality than efficiency or minimalism anyway. It was the happy medium between the user-friendly behemoth or Ubuntu, and the minimal "hardcore" distros like Arch Linux, Slackware, and Gentoo. While the difference in software support is significant, a more minimal Fedora would compete with Arch Linux, and lose.
What makes this AGILE?
Just not sure I understand how these goals can't be achieved with the current tools:
"include layers of modular enabling technologies.." RPMs?
"provide room for special interest groups to create solutions" Yum Package Groups? Kickstart?
"Ring One is base functionality and behavior that everyone can expect of any Fedora system" Minimal Install?
Maybe the idea is to use the current tools sets but in a more efficient way? I do like that they are pushing for JeOS images even a minimal fedora install comes with loads of things I don't care about or will ever need.
then we can discuss the appropriate structural milieu for forming a committee that will, eventually, discuss how to go about forming a committee that will discuss creating a committee to paint a bike shed.
first order of business - will this committee be a circle? or more a sort of a square. and will there be sandwiches? i love those little ones with the crust cut off, you know, like they are cut into little squares out of a regular size sandwich.
whats that? no. no. i dont care about the vegetarians. they can get their own food on the way here. ok muslims? fine. no pork. maybe we can have pork and then chicken, and we can put a little sign on them.. to split out which is which so... no, that wont work it might get mixed up while people are taking sandwiches...
and the gluten free people? what about people with celiac? oh god. this is getting complicated.
i know ... what if we form a committee to study the sandwich problem?
also about the funding.... i hate to bring it up... but...it has been some time since we have been renumerated for all our hard work painting the bike shed.
Sounds to me like they're talking about Debian, the way it's integrated and layered.
As a Debian fan who's often asked to administer RH boxes, this would be a welcome change.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Let me rephrase what's going on: Matt Miller is unhappy about the state of Fedora, but he can't really articulate exactly what he's unhappy about and how exactly would he have an imaginary uber-developer fix the issue. When you get rid of buzzwords and marketing speak, there's no substance left. How sad.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'd call it a 'set of bits' because the maintainers are usually careful not to include the exact same package twice.
It seems to me Fedora already does this. Fedora itself is a relatively small, bare distribution. it doesn't come with codecs, Flash, any proprietary repositories, VirtualBox, etc. That's why Adobe, Oracle and RPMFusion exist, they are add-ons to the core of Fedora. the Fedora project itself has always just been about providing a pretty small base and letting people throw on additional software at their own risk. This just breaks down the same model further. We could end up with Fedora Core, Fedora Extras and then all the third-party repositories on top. No thank you, I'll stick with an all-in-one set up like Mint or Debian.
If you really want to make Fedora better get rid of gnome3.
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So they're basically "reinventing" how BSD does things? They even blatantly copied an OpenBSD image for this presentation...
(Compare slide 13 from the presentation with OpenBSD 4.9 art)
In all seriousness though, it's a pretty good plan. Everyone knows that BSD means real engineering while Linux is "just a hobby, won't be big and professional"
On linux, that's a joke. Upgrading is like pulling teeth. From leftover files and configuration entries to kernel updates changing the bootloader's settings.
Back in the day (circa 2001, so RH 7 thru 7.3) before RH adopted YUM and the entire distrubtion fit on 1 CD, I was constantly frustrated by the unexplainable need of RH to make packages depend on completely unrelated stuff. I swear you couldn't install a 10kB console text editor without installing 50MB of dependencies. What possible reason could a console editor require libjpg? Things like that were common. IIRC, before YUM you had to type in every single package name x 20 or so packages (with exact versions like libjpg-rh7.1.2.3.0-i386.rpm); this was a serious hassle.
When it became time to move to another system, I went with Debian (woody I think) because the implementation was cleaner to begin with and APT was a godsend for dependency resolution. I say the implementation was cleaner, because even when reduced to using dpkg instead of APT, I usually only had to type in two or three dependencies, whereas I remember many more installing the same on RH.
So, yes. If I was still using RH/Fedora, I would love a clean and elegant (agile if you like buzzwords) implementation without all the extraneous crap.
you know how sometimes you run into a word a few times, then don't see it for years, then this word pops into your head for some unknown reason and a day or two later, BOOM!, there it is.
kinda freaky.
anywho, the word in this case is 'remunerated', which you misspelled here 'renumerated', which is kinda how it was brought to my attention years ago.
and stay off my lawn.
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Just so long as the "ring0" base system is based on Red Hat technology, right? Any distros (hey Debian) who follow this plan are going to find themselves working indirectly for Red Hat and killing off the distro model of linux distribution. It will also be near impossible for any new players (hello Canonical) to offer different "core" level technology since all of the ring0 stuff is tightly dependent on each other (hello GnomeOS). This ploy is only going to help Red Hat in the long run to the detriment of the diversely vibrant Linux ecosystem.
Again, with feeling now.
to rule them all! Of course, you insensitive hobbit clod!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.