Thoughts and Questions On Yum, Up2Date. Etc.

[Douglas Furlong]

On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 13:44, billg wrote:
> > In all the years that I have been using Microsoft, they have never
> > provided me with a pre-installed tool that allows me to start installing
> > stuff off of the web. I
> 
> No they don't, because the tool they offer is an updating tool, not a
> "find and install new software" tool.  MS doesn't offer the latter.
> Fedora does, and does not, in my opinion, successfully distinguish the
> two tools.
> 
> My point is that  mainstream customers of any potential retail 
This is not a potential retail product as far as either redhat or I
believe fedora is concerned. Any retail product that redhat ships, will
be redhat, not fedora, AND as some one else mentioned (which you have
happily apparently ignored), any redhat product will most likely provide
any and all updates via RHN, I would assume that they will garentee
their bandwidth for customers and as such won't have to run around
looking for mirrors.

> Linux
> product -- people who can be expected to care no more about how Linux
> works than they currently do about Windows --- will want to see updates
> come only from the company that sold them their OS.  

PLEASE get over this fascination with fedora being a retail product
being sold, it's a bloody hobbyist distribution. Not retail, not shrink
wrapped. This has been said lord knows how many times, but you keep on
harping on about it. Why oh why?
Yes redhat is using it as a testbed, but why not? I don't see any thing
wrong with that, it's never been hidden. Any thing redhat takes from it
will be merged in to their products, changes will be made where
necessary, and I do not doubt, that people purchasing their products are
unlikely to run in to the problems you appear to be complaining about.

> (They won't have a
> clue about GPG's, so they'll ask "Just because the guy who wrote this
> code has one of these GPG things, wy should I trust him? ") They won't be
> trolling the web looking for new software nearly as much as current Linux
> users  do, but a smart company would dramatically reduce their customer
> support woes caused by installation of "alien" code if they also offered
> a collection of "approved" and "official" programs for download.

Which redhat does do. However, the only real way that they can "approve"
some thing and make it "official" is by maintaining it them selves, in
which case it's going to be just as slow at releasing updates for
products as they are with their core distro. I doubt this is ever going
to change. And it makes complete sense. Can you not see that?

> These Linux users will not read man pages, will not subscribe to mailing
> lists, probably won't look at the help files, etc. 
Windows users DO use help files, windows users migrating to linux DO use
help files (possibly not man pages though).

> They'll expect all
> capabilities of a tool to be apparent from its display. If, for example,
> up2date has all kinds of wonderful capabilities accessible only via 
> command line options, they will never know that. They just consider the
> software lacking.

Read my post some where else about synaptec (however this is unlikely to
offer much for redhat, as far as lots of repo's are concerned but it
will be nice for this HOBBYIST NON-RETAIL NON-SHRINK-WRAPPED
distribution).

> Hardly any of this applies to the current Linux/Fedora community, whose
> members use and understand Linux. But their habits and preferences are
> the wrong base on which to build a product for mainstream retail
> acceptance.
blah blah blah blah blah, not retail, not retail, not retail, not
retail, is hobbyist, is hobbyist, is hobbyist, not retail not retail not
retail, blah blah blah blah (sorry if this seems dismissive you may make
good points but their drowned out by your bloody obsession with retail).

Doug