OT: What's the deal with Ubuntu?

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 01:28, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> GCC4 is a improvement. So these 
> would flow from Fedora to others. Other changes could come from other 
> platforms to Fedora.  If we cannot share core, we can share ideas. 

Sharing should go both ways.  Their good ideas include a 'run from
CD' version so you can easily test a release against your hardware
without a destructive installation, and a single-CD base install.
These are great features currently missing in Fedora.

> >  And in the context
> >of fedora, the servers most likely aren't re-installed from scratch
> >every 6 months.

> Support for Fedora Core 2 was moved to Fedora Legacy when Fedora Core 4 
> test 2 was released.  Fedora Legacy has a FAQ on  its support policy.  
> http://fedoralegacy.org/about/faq.php
> So its not necessary to do any reinstallations every 6 months. Fedora 
> due to its upgrading method of staying close to upstream rather not 
> backporting may not be suitable for servers anyway. I will write and 
> post more about this later

That's not exactly what I meant.  Even if you did re-install the
latest release on your servers, in most cases you wouldn't see
any difference.  Server features were pretty much complete in
RH 7.3.  There have been some bugfixes since - perhaps a few new
things in sendmail and the database servers but nothing that is
really going to pay for the downtime while you reinstall and
reconfigure to take advantage of anything different.  On the
other hand, there is almost nothing in common between what RH 7.3
offered on the desktop and what you want there today.  The
improvements there are so obvious that it is worth the effort to
change and so intertwined that it is best to blow everything away
and start over (and the files you need to keep should be on a server
anyway...).

>I don't think it is something that should be answered in theory.  
> >  
> >
> If you are interested in helping out, working out the packages 
> practically would be helpful. Like you said this can be answered in 
> theorotical statements that top 20 packages should be picked

I think it should be much more dynamic than a committee decision. How
about a framework where anyone who thought a system they had configured
was worth duplicating could run a program that extracted a list of
the installed RPMs minus the version numbers into a file that could
be uploaded somewhere?   Then add a program to Fedora's boot.iso that
could grab this file from a central or local location and install the
matching set of current RPMs.  Unless I'm mistaken, that would be about
half a page of perl or python, given the existing tools - maybe even
a single line.  Then it becomes an issue of marketing as to why that
set of choices is a good one for some intended purpose and the end
user only has to select one to get an expertly chosen set of
applications.  A subsequent step could be to automate the generation
of a iso image containing the selected packages, but the real value
would come from being able to share someone's expertise in package
selection. 

> >I'm not sure I understand the concept of a 'core' that is right for
> >both a desktop and a server install.  
> >  
> >
> So you think core should be focussed towards desktop. Thufir just mailed 
> me yesterday about his opinion that none of the DE's should be included 
> within Fedora core to accomodate users preferences better.  This is 
> certainly a subjective thing

What I mean is that Core vs. Extras is an administrative concept related
to who controls what packages.  From a user's perspective the important
grouping is the set of packages that need to be installed on any
particular machine, which will be related only to the purpose of the
installation - and for most purposes I'd expect a mix of Core and Extra
packages to be wanted. What matters from the user's side is the
effort/bandwidth needed to choose and install them, not where the master
copies are stored.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com