Hi All! Well, FC 6 is out, and I thought it might be a good time to just sit back a moment and watch at our product in contrast with other distributions and our structure in general. This mail might be a small (big?) rant here and there, but I hope that's okay now and then ;-). It also missed a "Problem foo can be solved by doing bar" -- but I can write such a document if there is interest in it. = Well, some good things first = * seems people quite like FC6 * we had no major bugs in it * FE6 seems to be okay as well (Extras didn't manage to push a proper comps.xml in time -- shame on us) = Some things that are not that well afaics = Well, this section is a bit longer :-/ Sorry. == Fedora Project Board == * it's not that much present -- we know it exists, but that's often all. * seems to meet quite seldom and it's hard to see what it does or if there even is progress somewhere * some Extras contributors mentioned to me that the hierarchy in the whole project is not documented properly (does FESCo get orders from the board? Where is the Packaging Committee located in the whole picture? Stuff like that...). * why doesn't the board at least now and then meet on irc so other interested parties can watch or comment? * the rpm problem is still not solved and makes a lot of people upset. == Fedora Core == I more and more get the impression that lots of Red Hat developers work directly in a lot of upstream projects (kernel, gnome, ...) and improve it in great ways. That a good thing as the whole Open-Source-Software-Stack gets better that way and everyone (including other distributions) can just use those improvements. That's a good thing and the main reason why I'm working in Fedora-Land and not for Ubuntu (they seem to be quite bad when it comes to be sending patches back upstream) or OpenSuse (remember the Xgl and Compiz stuff that was developed behind closed doors for quite some time; not to mention the recent Novell - MS happenings). But on the other hand it seems to me that the progress in our distribution specific stack (anaconda, config tools, initscripts) is quite slow. And not only that, also the infrastructure of Fedora for the community (new VCS, let community help in Core, ...) seems to go forward quite slowly (e.g. nearly nothing). Yes, there is some process and some quite nice new features here and there, but OpenSuse and especially Ubuntu seem to be a lot better in that area and (more important) get much more attention in the news and within the Linux community for their improvements. The Live-CD is a good example for the problems -- how long are we working on it now without a real result? Much to long! Boot-time improvements are another area where Ubuntu and Opensuse got a lot better in past. And we? Readahead improvements like https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=156442 linger around without much process for ages. 73 of 850 files in readahed.early and 441 of 3757 files in readahead.later don't even exist on FC7. Readahead.later should run as last app in the init process, but doesn't as there are several other initscripts that run at level 99 (some of them are started after readahead later). There was much talk about a new init system but nothing real came out of it (and Ubuntu got all the credits for their upstart in between). Starting some jobs in parallel/or while the log-in screen is shown was in the discussion and even in testing once, but seems to have vanished again (Opensuse does something like that these days iirc). And RHGB still starts once, ends, and a new X is fireed of for the real session :-/. Takes some more time again. I also like Fedora Core due to the "Open-Source only" and "Upsteam please" attitude. But most of the normal users only see the disadvantages (nearly no drivers/features that are not upstream in out packages, no ACPI-DSTD in initrd [see also http://hughsient.livejournal.com/5889.html -- that blog entry is a good general example IMHO], no acrobat, no jre from sun, no proprietary drivers from ati/nvidia and not even the firmware for ipw2[12]00 ) that behavior creates -- and at the same time we are AFAICS quite bad when if comes to communicate the "But we are the good guys and that's the disadvantage we have to for being the good guys" to out users (that might give us some bonus points here and there). We also don't get a unique "Fedora look and feel" to the world. "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software and content." (quote from http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives ). Well, that's true in some parts of Fedora (nearly always latest KDE, major kernel updates, Gnome Updates to 2.x.0 to 2.x.[0-9], lot's of updates in Extras-Land), but fail in other areas (no gutenprint in FC6 [a lot of printers are not supported due to that], only Firefox 1.5[Ubuntu 6.10 shipped two days after FC6 and has Firefox 2.0 and gutenprint] and no sign of a update in Core to FF 2.0, no X.org-Update to 7.1 [even after the proprietary drivers where able to handle it; owners of G965 hardware were left out in the cold without Support in Fedora due to this as the driver for that popular hardware depends on/is shipped in Xorg 7.1], sometimes users have to wait ages to get the latest Gnome (remember FC4) because that's not updated and out schedule isn't aligned to the gnome schedule [in other words: users of Ubuntu get the hard work from a lot of Red-Hat-Gnome-hackers earlier then Fedora Core users -- arrggghhhhh]). I especially dislike the behavior for * Gnome and Firefox as a lot of users are interested to run the latest version of those packages (sure, that's often stupid, but that's how it is) * X.org and gutenprint, as hardware support is crucial -- that sucks even more as out hardware support in other areas of Fedora is quite good as kernel and packages like sane get updates to new upstream version regularly We still have no "Fedora Core steering Commitee" (see also https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2006-September/msg00079.html ) -- what core does or how decisions are made it completely in the dark for the Community and that really sucks. Why don't we have a public roadmap? That might give community members at least a chance to get interested in topics and start helping getting them done. == Fedora Extras == * Developers from Core talk to Extras contributors more often these days; still far from prefect, but it's getting better * the Fedora Directory Server is still not in Core or Extras afaik * we can't do anything we'd like to do; I hope we can get a bit more support from RH in the future == MISC == * I got the impression (and LWN readers, too ["hello corbert! "]) that Fedora Legacy is not able to do it's job properly. Maybe it's time to just revamp the whole project? = Closing = That's all that came to my mind now. I'm sure I missed a lot of stuff. Maybe I should maintain this document in the wiki and add all the stuff there in the next month and post it again after FC7 ;) Anyway, thx everybody for you hard work in Fedora. I like the project. But I think we could do much better -- thus this mail. CU thl _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board-readonly mailing list fedora-advisory-board-readonly@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board-readonly
