[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

| But the first question should be why a separate community is necessary.  Why
| is it not possible for one of fedora's goals to be to provide a clean
| transition to RHEL or Centos at the end of certain development cycles

I think that this idea has some merit.  I'm taking this out of context
to use as a jump-off point.

[I'm a long-term Red Hat and Fedora user.  I also use Ubuntu
sometimes.]

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has seduced me with its simultaneous promises of being
maintained and having a current code base.

RHEL/CentOS feels too old.  Concrete issues:

- support for video cards

- PostgreSQL 8.3 vs 8.1

Ubuntu 8.04 will be quite stale before the next LTS comes out.
Probably more stale that RHEL/CentOS.  It is all a matter of where
each stream is in the cycle.  Right now, Ubuntu LTS is ahead of
RHEL/CentOS.

Ubuntu LTS is in the same series as regular Ubuntu.  RHEL/CentOS are
not the same as Fedora.  One could predict that the transition costs
between Ubuntus are lower that the transition costs from RHEL/CentOS
to or from Fedora.  This is a disadvantage.

I find the various Fedora-targeted 3rd party repositories confusing
and even conflicting.  This isn't healthy.  I've not had this problem
with Ubuntu but I'm not sure why.


I like that fedora is willing to take radical steps.  This is the only
way to do some important experiments.


Some changes make me (a conservative at heart) uncomfortable:

- the idea that network connectivity is part of a session just seems
  bizarre to me.  Network Manager may be useful but I think that this
  aspect does not fit in with my UNIX world-view.

- the idea that non-X consoles will go bothers me.  Just a few minutes
  ago, I used a non-X console to whack on an X problem.  I hit a lot
  of X problems due to the way hardware gets introduced more quickly
  than X versions are released (and debugged).  I may stop using
  Fedora when this change comes to pass.

- Documentation that I expect is not provided.

- the anatomy of the system changes more quickly than my
  understanding.  HAL/d-bus/etc. all seem like magic to me.



Why should a (source) package release be tied to a distro release?
For a lot of packages, the actual minimum requirements on the
environment are satisfied by earlier distro releases.

The strongest argument against is to do with testing: real
dependencies might diverge from declared dependencies and only testing
can show this.  This adds a lot of testing burden to the package
maintainer.

Some packages really are not independent modules.  Updating such a
package may require updating a lot of others.  At least sometimes
these binary packages are all created from a single source package.


I wonder if smooth evolution (frequent uncoordinated package updates),
as opposed to punctuated equilibrium (updates tied to distro releases)
would work.