Where are we going in the Fedora development?

[James Wilkinson]

akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
> Once again I want to share something but don't want to start a rant.
> 
> I finally got FC3 installed and have serious questions as to where
> this Fedora Development is going. Are changes being made for good
> reason or just to be different?

William Hooper has addressed your individual concerns.

Where Fedora is going, as I understand it, is to make the underlying
collection of Open Source projects from which it is built as good as
they can be. This means:

 * Fedora needs to be at the forefront of the technology that is being
   developed. It needs to incorporate the latest and greatest so that
   the community can track what's happening, and make sure it all plays
   well together.

 * It also needs to be as close as possible to the Open Source projects.
   Red Hat specific "solutions" tend to be band-aids that don't get into
   the underlying projects.

 * Where there are gaps in the projects available (hotplug, POSIX
   threading, Stateless, etc.), Red Hat engineers can create new
   projects as part of the wider community. With any luck, they can do
   so without the project being "too Red Hat", and so there's a better
   chance other distros will pick up on the work, and we can all
   benefit.

So new code should get into the Rawhide tree not that long after it is
written. Any bugs that are spotted can then be taken back to the project
responsible for fixing.

So some of the differences you've spotted are simply due to Fedora trying
to get back to the underlying project, and some to very new
functionality.

If you don't like the direction: well, it's normally the underlying
project (GNOME, for example) that has taken a particular route. And it's
on their mailing lists that flames can reach their target...

It amazes me that it works quite as well as it does, to be honest.

James.
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