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

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

At 12:17 6/8/2004, Sean Estabrooks wrote:
>The decision to pursue selinux and the 2.6 kernel
>was driven to meet the needs of the Fedora community which includes
>people who want to explore emerging technologies.

I have a bad habit of waxing rhetorical. Sorry. So here I go again...

I think Sean has an *excellent* way of putting it. The Fedora Project is 
not intended to be experimental, perpetually-beta, or bleeding-edge as some 
have expressed. It is, however, intended to "explore emerging technologies" 
and tries to stay at the forefront of current development. That is, 
leading-edge but not bleeding-edge.

Nowhere is the leading edge problem-free. Not in Suse, not in Windows, not 
in space exploration... nowhere. People who want to run revenue-producing, 
mission-critical services are almost *never* on the leading edge because 
they can't afford even a few glitches; they just want it to work! That's 
where you see people running RHEL, or still running RHL 6.2 through 9 and 
keeping up with patches themselves. Why? It works, it produces revenue, 
it's stable, and it's *reliable*. Leading-edge, advanced, cutting-edge, 
modern... those are all words with no meaning in this context.

I *am* personally running revenue-producing servers on FC1 and FC2, but I 
also have one server still on RHL-7.3 which I am about to migrate to 
RHEL-ES. The choice of Red Hat or Fedora systems exclusively is one that I 
made to maximize the applicability of my previous learning, and also on the 
grounds that I appreciate and support Red Hat, Inc.'s philosophical 
objectives to support and promote open-source and Free software. The choice 
of *version* is dependent on the criticality of the server, the downtime I 
can afford in case of problems, the need for modern technologies, and even 
how far the server is from my house. Not kidding.

We all need to OBJECTIVELY evaluate the goals and strategies of each 
operating system and use the best tool for each task. Do not expect Fedora 
to be rock-solid... that's not its stated purpose. On the other hand, I 
think that Fedora's stability is damn good considering its efforts to move 
forward quickly. To each his own, and your mileage may vary.

Just one thing... if you're going to move to another distro, go ahead. 
Posting "maybe it's time to move to another distro" is worthless and no one 
gives a damn. Either stay, enjoy Fedora, be happy, and ideally help out a 
little as a solid citizen of this community, or go somewhere else. Either 
choice is fine! But staying and harassing the rest of us by threatening to 
leave will get you no sympathy and no mercy. No pity parties here.

I'm off to improve my new four-zone firewall on FC2 and work on my "Small 
Netserver HOWTO" for FC1/FC2. A small crumb of contribution it may be, but 
damnit I'm going to move forward not backward. The rest of you can do as 
you please.

Cheers,


-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com