[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 07:53:35AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> 
> Blame too those upstream projects who introduce these changes, fedora is
> just a collection of all those items.  

It is not that simple. The distinction between fedora and upstream in
many cases is rather fuzzy. For example the hal/dbus/consoleKit/*Kit is
put in fedora when it is at early development stages, and many of the
developpers involved in these are also involved in fedora. And the
changes are pushed in fedora without taking seriously the backward
compatibility issues. For example wdm and xdm (and slim) are broken
since consolekit replaced pam_console, and although there is a rather
simple solution to integrate those dm it has never been planned and it
is still not fixed, though a fix exist for months. As long as it worked
in gdm it was fine for fedora. You can tell, hey, xdm, wdm and slim can
copy what gdm does, but when the solution implemented in gdm is specific
and not consistent with the previous designs, it is not so easy. Fedora
controls some upstream so can do anything in these, but doesn't control
all of them.

I am not saying that it is a wrong approach, being able to have a
platform for experimentation is indeed valuable, but you cannot charge
upstream for all regressions in fedora, especially when improper or
unplanned integration is linked with the regression, or the unstability
is linked with different features being proposed in packages controlled
by people in fedora and packages with an independent upstream.

In comparison, the transition to upstart was smooth, and a reason may be
that fedora wasn't the testing ground for that feature that originated
from ubuntu (though fedora people helped upstream at the time it was
integrated in fedora).

--
Pat