Comments: IN DEPTH: Fedora 10 Preview

[Max Spevack]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2008, Mathieu Bridon (bochecha) wrote:

>> Another point that had me scratching my head was the same host 
>> indicating that Fedora had a lot of features that were in Ubuntu 
>> 8.10.  This is certainly true, but the differentiator is that many of 
>> these features were *built* by Fedora contributors, inside and 
>> outside Red Hat.  It's important for us to keep emphasizing this 
>> fact.
>
> This is something that has be bugging me for a long time.
>
> Basically, Ubuntu X gets out just a little before Fedora X.
>
> Take the release notes for Ubuntu, they are mainly including « 
> features » that count in the Fedora X features.
>
> Who gets the credit ? The first one to communicate about them...
>
> We should really start communicating about the features very early in 
> the process, as soon as they were accepted, even if we later have to 
> tell « this feature could not be completed in time and is reported ».

A while back we started talking about Fedora in terms of -- Freedom, 
Folks, Features, First.

If "features" and "first" are hurting because of where we are in the 
calendar compared to the Ubuntu release, allowing them the chance to 
release their new distro first and to receive a lot of credit for new 
features when reviewers and press don't understand where the upstream 
work is being done (in Fedora, for example), then Fedora Marketing 
should ask the Fedora Board to think about altering our "May Day" and 
"Halloween" release targets by a little bit, so that Fedora's cycle 
finishes before Ubuntu's.

Keep in mind that our original release date for Fedora 10 was supposed 
to be October 28, which would have been 2 days before Ubuntu 8.10.

Ubuntu 9.04 is currently scheduled for April 23, whereas F11 would 
probably be either April 28th or May 5th.  OpenSuse's release cycle 
currently seems to be a June/December one.

Interested to hear other people's thoughts.

--Max