[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 16:53 -0500, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 4:35 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 12:38 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> >> Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> >> > Itamar - IspBrasil wrote:
> [snip]
> >> The fact that they switched to CentOS is *good* for Fedora.
> > I can not disagree more - To me, it's yet another evidence of Fedora
> > being on the loose.
> 
> You're going to have to expound on that. I do not see Centos in any
> way as in competition with Fedora.
EPEL drains away resources from Fedora.

If people were investing the time they (as I feel waste) on supporting
EPEL into Fedora, Fedora would be better.

>  Centos is something everyone should
> be proud of.
Well, to me CentOS is as important as any other arbitrary Linux distro.
I am glad they are around, but not more and not less.

> >>  CentOS's
> >> goals are better oriented to the needs of someone that wants to deploy a
> >> system and run it for years.  Fedora is good for people who want to get
> >> the latest technologies from upstream as soon as they're stable enough
> >> to integrate into a running system.
> > Right. But why can't Fedora do better? I feel Fedora could do better.
> 
> Sure. With more devs, servers, time, etc.
... less bureaucracy, less committees/less chiefs/more Indians,
different people, different strategies.

>  But baring a sudden increase
> in those, I would much prefer to see Fedora focus on dev and testing,
> let other distros pretty things up.
ACK. Unfortunately, Fedora is drifting away from this group towards
single-user desktops (e.g. OLPC).

> >> > This situation seems to be reflected in the Fedora project itself.
> >> > Guess, how many Fedora infrastructure servers are run under the latest
> >> > "stable" Fedora release?
> >>
> >> As few as possible.
> > IMO, a fundamental management/infrastructure mistake - If these people
> > were using Fedora, they would be facing the issues Fedora users are
> > facing everyday and likely would being to understand why people complain
> > about Fedora.
> 
> Why would they, after often suggesting that Fedora _not_ be used on
> production servers, use Fedora on their production servers?
Depends on how they mean it:
- if they are referring to "long term maintained/everlasting support"
servers, they are right.
- if they mean it as "Fedora is technically too unstable", then this
people should start working on improving the situation or (better) quit
Fedora.

> >>   The reason is not about stability.  It is about
> >> updates.  Once Fedora stops getting updates we'd have to upgrade to the
> >> next Fedora release with all of the churn that causes for vastly
> >> unrelated pieces of the OS.
> > Gotcha! If not even the Fedora project can handle the issues, why do you
> > expect users to be able to solve them? I think technically the issues
> > can be overcome. It's a matter of will.
> 
> Well, it's not really an issue. It's only an issue if you run Fedora
> on your production servers.
They would be less issues, if Fedora was using Fedora for its servers.

More bluntly: The fact Fedora is not using Fedora for its servers is a
shame for Fedora.

Ralf