Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Les Mikesell]

Alan Cox wrote:
>>> real utility to the general user community, to providing a bleeding-edge
>>> moving target.  You can try to use it if you wish, of course; but you've
>>> little (if any) guarantee that normal updates won't break it, and you
>>> are assured that you MUST carry out a major version upgrade within a year.
> 
> I would disagree about bleeding edge - Fedora tries to be current Which
> is what people were asking for at the time and still do so: very loudly.

Are there _really_ that many people asking for major changes in the 
kernel to be done in mid-rev of a distro?  Or are people actually just 
asking for current userland apps and perhaps drivers for new sata 
controllers and the like?

> There were two distinct communities demanding exactly opposite things.
> RHEL serves one of them (and thus Centos if you want bits not services),
> Fedora is the other.
> 
> I'm actually suprised you've not moved to something like Centos Les as
> people have suggested repeatedly that this would fit your needs better.

I have, on the server side.  Mostly still Centos 3.x which has been 
extremely reliable. Do you happen to know what kernel companies that 
base their products that need to be extremely reliable on (F5's BigIP, 
Avaya phone switches, etc.)?  Are any using a recent 2.6.x?

But firefox 1.5 just isn't what people should have on their desktops 
today, let alone until RHEL5's end of life.


>> Which, I suppose, made the Ubuntu distribution or something like it 
>> inevitable as most people have little use for a software testbed and 
>> predictably decide not to take fedora.
> 
> Rawhide is the testbed, and the -testing repositories. If you want a
> bleeding edge software testing distribution take a look at Gentoo. 

If I hadn't actually been running (or trying to run...) fedora since its 
beginning, I might accept that line.  But I've had too many instances of 
unbootable update kernels and broken firewire support to trust it with 
anything important now.  And it's too bad - I have one machine running 
RH7.3 that has been up for 4 years now (well firewalled so I'm not too 
concerned about security updates).  I just miss that kind of reliability 
and updates that were actual improvements in the X.3 versions.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com