Fedora Makes a Terrible Server?
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Mar 24 21:36:43 UTC 2008
Tim Alberts wrote:
>>> Unfortunately, everything that is beneficial about Fedora comes with
>>> the price of 'not quite as well tested' status as RedHat or CentOS.
>>>
>>> Honestly I feel like a backstabber by using CentOS because I've been
>>> with Fedora since before Fedora (RedHat 5.1 was my first Linux
>>> experience), and using CentOS is reaping the benefits with no
>>> contribution.
>>
>> If you go back that far, you should realize that fedora is
>> approximately like the old RH X.0 releases (X from 4 to 7) and Centos
>> is like the old RH X.2 or X.3 releases (free download of the tested
>> and more stable releases). The numbering scheme is just different
>> now. The for-pay-only RHEL is the part that diverged from the old
>> scheme.
> Yeah there are different groups filling the roles all along the
> life-cycle of each release version.
> You could even say that CentOS provides what FedoraLegacy intended to
> provide.
> Not really the point of what I'm saying though...
The point I was trying to make was that in the old days when RH made its
name by getting a community of users involved, the users who tested
the X.0 versions and reported the problems that made the fixes possible
were eventually given access to the X.2/X.3 versions containing those
fixes. Fedora/RH no longer works that way. The community putting up
with the X.0 problems never gets a stable update unless they switch to
Centos. The next fedora release will be like the old next X.0's were.
> Again my question, how can Fedora produce a better tested product?
Fedora has the option of rebranding the Centos packages for a long-term
supported version or building their own similar version from the RHEL
sources. I think it would have been trivial to slipstream the FC1
updates to a copy of the Centos 3.x update repro, the FC3 -> Centos4,
and FC6 ->Centos5. In fact I think there are people who have done that
with yum even though it wasn't planned to work.
> The
> way it is, it's dis-respectful to the Fedora project for people to post
> things like:
>
> http://www.mjmwired.net/linux/2008/02/11/fedora-makes-a-terrible-server/
>
> because it is the work of the Fedora Project and the users who end up
> testing the software and suffering through software bugs and poorly
> packaged projects.
I don't think so. Post something on the fedora developers site about
focusing on stability and you'll find no one is interested. In fact
they will point out their objectives:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives are to stay on the leading edge
and close to upstream development instead. It is not disrespectful to
say that they are meeting their objectives.
> CentOS and RedHat would be no where near as stable
> without Fedora.
No one says they would - but that doesn't make fedora a reasonable
server platform.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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