Linux.org: The Feodra 7 Year Itch

[Bryan J Smith]

Sorry, FUD.

1.  The Debian (and DCC) and Fedora (and RHEL) release models are not comparable.  Some of us have been Debian maintainers and we'll be the first to tell you that.  ;)

2.  Fedora is quite stable for production use, especially in an environment with AFS or NFS and other UNIX infrastructure. A lot of that has to do with Fedora's focus on enterprise features.

3.  The release model for Fedora was _already_proven_ by no less than 15 Red Hat Linux releases. It remains unchanged now. The "release often" model is not an issue, it's a requirement of the lifecycle.

Why oh why do people have to compare Fedora to other distros? If you don't like the proven RHL/Fedora release model and lifecycle, at least stop to understand it. If you prefer Debian's lifecycle, by all means, go for it!

But let us not forget these realities ...

What distro put forth GLibC 2 (threaded libC)?
What distro put forth GCC 3 (ANSI C++ compliance)?
What distro put forth NPTL (various threading/compat)?
What distro put forth SELinux (MAC/RBAC)?

People talk about Red Hat Linux, then Fedora Core, "breaking things."
People are still talking about how Red Hat Linux 5 "broke everything."
Same deal for 7, 9 and Fedora Core 2, without stopping to wonder why.
No one steps back to realize the _massive_effort_ it took to adopt these radical changes.
They just look at Debian or some other distro some year or two later and say - "oh, we waited until it was stable."

Um, no.  Sorry.

You waited until another distro adopted something, including redeveloping many core components,
and then all other developers/maintainers had to accommodate, and reaped the benefits of that after-the-fact.
All while blaming it on Red Hat Linux, now Fedora, two fold - complaining about the change and incompatibility, then hypocritically saying you waited on the compatibility.

Sorry, putting something into Sid isn't the same as a major, refactored Red Hat Linux / Fedora release.
It takes a crapload of effort to make massive, core changes, just to get to that release.
And that still doesn't address the issues post-release of added software, which also has to be refactored.
It's then, and only then, we get the necessary, concerted effort to "move forward."

Not by sitting back and waiting for someone like Red Hat to force the issue and projects to accomodate.
Also remeber the percentage of contributions Red Hat developers make to various projects, to help them refactor and redevelop after major changes.


--  
Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com  
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile  
    

-----Original Message-----
From: "Wilmer Jaramillo M." <wilmer at fedoraproject.org>

Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:20:09 
To:"For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base" <fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Linux.org: The Feodra 7 Year Itch


On 6/21/07, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> On Thursday 21 June 2007 11:49:57 Chris Negus wrote:
> > Has anyone on the Fedora project considered making one stable Fedora
> > release every three or four releases? You could promote the release as
> > having:
> >
> > * Stable desktop and servers
> > * Three years of security updates
> > * Branding program with hardware manufacturers
>
> We do, it's called Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat is not doubt the leader, But you do not mention the cost.

I'm going to mention some words of the writer very healthily:
"Perhaps a lesson from the Debian project is in order: release no
distribution before its time. Fedora 7 developers have released a
distribution that's not ready for prime time."

Debian provides this type of structure in its distribution,
maintaining a unstable version, must understood like "unstable safe"
or a "stable risk", at the same time its to stay in bloody line of the
technology adding efforts in maintaining a version completelly
"stable",  this does not means that Fedora cannot be used in
production environment, (sometimes Fedora is considering as a
experimental distributions) but I must recognize that it constitutes a
risk, a sysadm know that a package must be consider stable "with time
in the market production", its RHEL and CentOS and is here where maybe
the branch stable Debian version wins. Fedora need a official stable
release (as Debian stable or CentOS for RHEL) matters only for
security updates version of choice for networks and servers for those
for whom dependability matters more than the latest software, and on
one hand the already customary itch out releases.

I believe that Red Hat I do not want to create a new competition of
RHEL and this is the reason for which a branch stable of Fedora is
impossible beyond of operative costs that imply to maintain it.


-- 
Wilmer Jaramillo M.
GPG Key Fingerprint = 0666 D0D3 24CE 8935 9C24 BBF1 87DD BEA2 A4B2 1E8A

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