Where Fedora Went Wrong (nice conclusion)

[alan]

On Thu, 17 May 2007, Matej Cepl wrote:

> On 2007-05-15, 16:45 GMT, William Case wrote:
>> I use Fedora because I like the thought that it is cutting
>> edge, etc. What I would like to know is: Are the contributions
>> of users to fixing Fedora picked up by other distributions
>> and/or up the line for applications?
>
> Whatever other people think about Red Hat being a corporate
> behemot, I can testify, that in a Red Hat training I heard on my
> ears high-level engineering people to stress repeatedly and very
> forcefully, that any patch we make and solution we find for
> a bug, should be immediately send upstream. Which I think is one
> of the things which differentiates us against many other Linux
> distributions. That's not bashing of Ubuntu and/or SuSE -- they
> have their reasons for being what they are, just that I can
> confirm that even inside Red Hat there is strong official stress
> on upstreaming everything reasonable.

When I was working on a project testing security patches I was amazed at 
just how many patches by various distributions never made it upstream. 
(This was back in the Redhat 7.3 days, but may still hold true.)  I am 
glad that someone is pushing those patches upstream.  It would be nice if 
those things were noted in the Bugzilla reports so they could be followed 
up on.  (I have had reported bug that have just sat and rotted with no 
activity or followup for years.)

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox