[Fedora] Re: FC1 stable, FC2 ... you wish.

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 06:41, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Jun 2004, Craig White wrote:
> > I guess it's just me but I tend to stick to proven distro's for
> > production servers. I wouldn't necessarily put FC-1 in that category and
> > obviously, not FC-2. Obviously Red Hat considers their RHEL to be the
> > 'stable' product and Fedora to be the experimental/development product. 
> > The philosophy has changed since RHL.
> > 
> > That being said, I guess in the final analysis, what you have done here
> > is commit the proverbial spin yours and everyone else's wheels.
> > 
> > Consider please:
> > - it ain't a bug if it isn't in bugzilla.
> > - if you have a problem, the moment you 'rollback', your problem report
> > is relegated to the equivalent of noise to the list since no suggested
> > fixes can be experimented.
> > 
> > I am amazed at the number of people that don't recognize the
> > experimental nature of the Fedora distribution and are content to be
> > part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
> 
> 
> That's the funny thing.  Every time somebody complains that FC is 
> "unstable" or "experimental" (usually threatening to move to another 
> distro in the same breath), about a dozen acolytes jump in and slam the 
> OP.  Those of us who are becoming more and more unhappy with FC miss the  
> solidity of RHL.  We're lifting our voices, hoping for a positive response 
> but getting slammed instead.
> 
> I'm still running RHL 9 for my home server because, by the time I was 
> satisfied that FC 1 was working relatively well on a test PC, FC 2 came 
> out.  Well, that meant that my FC 1 install would only be supported for 
> another couple of months.  (Yes, I know about fedora legacy, but they're 
> swamped and don't have a track record yet.)  So, I held off to see how FC 
> 2 would work.  It doesn't.  There are a *lot* of things broken with FC 2, 
> several of which are show-stoppers for me.  (Is *anybody* *ever* gonna fix 
> OpenSSL so that dovecot will work with it???)
> 
> I can't afford to run RHEL ES at home, and the WS doesn't have all of the 
> services that I run for myself.  I'm not rich, nor am I a corporation.  
> I'm just a guy who wants to have his little 866MHz PIII Celeron humming 
> away doing what I need it to.  Fedora would be just fine  if I could count 
> on installing it and then being able to leave it for a year or two without 
> having to worry about whether or not the security patches would dry up.  
> 
> I dunno.  I loved RHL enough to convince my boss to move from Windoze to 
> linux in our data center.  But now that we've gotten the funding and are   
> doing evaluations, other distros are now looking good.  We're especially 
> impressed with SuSe's Open Exchange.
> 
> Sorry for the rambling.  It just feels like my best friend died. :(
----
I fully understand your feeling - and I see Red Hat's point too...that
trying to maintain a 'stable' distro for free (RHL) is counterproductive
to having a 'stable' distro for businesses (RHEL). Clearly Fedora has
not been, nor is it intended to be a 'stable' distribution.

I can tell you that my 'home' server is still running RH 8.0, can't see
any reason to upgrade it. My desktops are FC-1 and FC-2, though I will
upgrade the FC-1 when I get time...my experiences thus far with Fedora
have been great as a desktop OS.

As for the office, it seems to me that the RHEL is a pretty darn good
value, support, upgrade/update assurance and stable - but of course,
when you talk about RHEL, or Debian stable, etc., you aren't talking
about cutting edge 2.6 kernels, or the updates included on a lot of
projects and even the security patches are backported onto older
versions.

That being said, I think the issues you are raising are shared by many
and it wouldn't surprise me to see something like FC-1 being maintained
as a 'stable' product for some time. Obviously, other distro's are
available and they are certainly valid options if they can deliver the
packaging and stability consistent with your expectations.

Craig