fedora-devel-list Digest, Vol 12, Issue 86

[Michael A. Peters]

On 02/27/2005 05:46:51 PM, Martin Sevior wrote:

> 
> 
> How sad. We constantly push the envolope, fix bugs, provide upgrades
> and
> provide rpm's for stable and development version of our program for
> FC3, FC2, FC1 and redhat 9 on our website.
> 
> Maybe we should just stick with source and Debian.
> 
> I've been seriously thinking of moving to Ubuntu anyway.
> 
> Well I guess that's just about it for FC as a community distro.
> 
> Martin Sevior
> 
> Core AbiWord Developer.

As someone is an absolutely huge fan of AbiWord, and as a member of the  
Fedora "community" as a user and not a @hat address, I would like to  
comment on this.

The problem as I see it is that Fedora Core is getting too big with too  
much duplicated functionallity. The Fedora Extas infrastructure now  
exists as a place where alternative packages can still be maintained  
and developed that integrate tightly with Fedora Core, and with quality  
control - by the very community that uses them.

I see that as a good thing, it is a lot easier to get Fedora to the  
public if it is smaller to download, cheaper to burn (less CD's), etc.

A lot of the popularity of Ubuntu is that it is a small distro - not a  
lot of CD's.

If I had my way, OO.o and Evolution would go to extras and AbiWord/ 
Gnumeric/Balsa/Pan would be in Core - but the user community uses OO.o  
and Evolution, those apps are more popular.

That doesn't mean AbiWord/Gnumeric/Balsa etc. shouldn't be available,  
but it does mean that currently they are downloaded for every CD/DVD  
install and usually never installed by the users. By moving them into  
Extras, they are still there for people who do want to use them, but  
Core is a smaller download for the majority who do not.

Abiword, Gnumeric, and GStreamer are my personal favorite OSS projects.
It is sad imho to see the first two going out of core, but I think it  
needs to done, at least until people figure out that OO.o is too slow  
and bloated with too high maintenance to be worth it. OO.o had  
excellent marketing - that's what gave it momentum, it will (I think)  
die down (especially now that Windows AbiWord and OS X AbiWord are  
starting to take shape)

This may actually be a good thing for AbiWord - since it is going to be  
in Extras, and you guys already build rpm's for FC, perhaps someone  
from AbiWord could become the Extras maintainer for it, ensuring the  
quality of the product available through yum for Fedora Core users.

I'm not on AbiWord devel list, but maybe someone there wants to do  
that.


-- 
Michael A. Peters
http://mpeters.us/