Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Nov 24, 2007 8:22 AM, Todd Zullinger <tmz at pobox.com> wrote:
> You'd really want to ask someone from fedora-infrastructure this
> question.  I know that at least some of the build boxes run FC6.

It's not clear that the question was about fedora infrastructure using
fedora.. or if it was redhat infrastructure using fedora.... not the
same question at all.

But let's assume the question is about Fedora infrastructure.  The
answer is that, unless a new feature only found in the Fedora
distribution is needed for infrastructure purposes, then
fedora-infrastructure prefers to use RHEL or CentOS due primarily to
the release lifetime difference. Unless there is a technical reason to
prefer the latest Fedora release, the extended lifetime of RHEL/CentOS
provides additional benefits to production systems that the Fedora
distribution can not.  And that's absolutely OKAY.  And its a
completely reasonable way to approach making use of the Fedora
ecosystem in a production environment generally. Making an informed
choice of which distribution in the Fedora ecosystem you want to use
is done by evaluating  a set of trade-offs.

Fedora the distribution is used when there is a compelling new
technology that the infrastructure team can make use of immediately.
That system is converted to RHEL when that technology lands in RHEL.
Fedora-infrastructure does make use of EPEL on pretty much all of the
rhel/centos systems they are currently using. There are critical
pieces of fedora infrastructure that are only found in the contributor
maintained EPEL repositories.. koji for example.  So even if you don't
count RHEL as a use of Fedora (even though some of the packages
shipped in RHEL still hold fedora distags so I'm told) its
inconceivable  to me to not count the use of EPEL packages as direct
use of Fedora. So with that said, Fedora infrastructure makes use of
Fedora project built components on virtually every system they
maintain.


If you are like me and believe that the Fedora project's most
compelling mission is to create an open source ecosystem driving by
aggressive technology innovation, then the question of
what specific 'distribution' in the Fedora ecosystem any particular
system uses isn't important at all.  What is important is that we have
a way for the community to get together and build open solutions to
meet their needs inside the ecosystem.  If you are running a
production system and you feel that the Fedora distribution is not a
good fit for your usage case and you have chosen RHEL or CentOS, then
you can still contribute to EPEL and be a part of the larger Fedora
project effort.

-jef