Why Would Fedora be Free ? Can it be Trusted?

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 02:53:54AM +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> 
> Note that I'm not commenting on the quality, but that there are
> evidently different procedures. I personally prefer a more relaxed one,
> but saying that FC and RHEL follow the same procedures is putting it
> quite mildy :)

Any organization that has multiple procedures defined for essentially
the same class of product is kidding themselves.  People are people
and unless the two are kept in total isolation the process will merge
or things break.

People tend to operate the same as a group no matter what task you
give them so the "procedures" need to be as self similar and portable
as is possible.  IMO, the engineering should be job one and the
process and procedures (including learning curve) should not dominate
the work (unless you are the federal government).

That said, the "criteria" driving equivalent procedures might differ
at the engineer or manager levels.  Clearly one criteria difference
between FC and RHEL is the state of documentation.

Another component to this discussion is that Linux releases might best
be described as an "Anthology".  The editor of the anthology (RHEL,
Fedora, debian, BSD, etc) can pick and choose from the available material
and collect the best set of packages that address the "theme" of the
anthology.  If you look at the stated goals (theme) for FC and RHEL
there are differences in the resulting collections that fall out.

One case for this, is the removal of imapd from FC2, replacing it with
a choice for the system manager (dovecot or cyrus-imapd).  Neither is
as well documented as I would like (see my criteria comment above) but
dovecot seems to be the simple system choice of the future while
cyrus-imapd seems designed for heavy duty mail servers of the future.
Both dovecot and cyrus-imap are new in the RH view of things.  This is
in keeping with the Fedora goals:

    "The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported
    open source project. It is also a proving ground for new
    technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat
    products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc"
    ( http://fedora.redhat.com/ )

So same process, different criteria and goals: think Anthology.

And BTW if you do not like dovecot or cyrus-imapd there is nothing
obvious stopping you from installing the current imapd.  It might be
necessary to recompile and repackage from source, but you are permitted.
Your machine can be 'your anthology'.

Of interest in this open source community, with 'bugzilla' you can
inspect the current reported bug list and chart it against your own
needs (criteria).  This is almost impossible for a user to do on other
OS products.

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
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