On Saturday 04 June 2005 13:57, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Well, no. Fedora sort-of matches the X.0 Red Hat Releases that, after
> one or a few trials, most system administrators knew to avoid in
> production and wait for the usable X.2 version that developed
> quickly because the bait of a free reliable version drew help
> from a huge community in fixing the initial bugs that were always
> pushed out. But Fedora never gives you the fixed/usable release.
FC3 is very stable, very close to RHEL4, and many packages in RHEL4 are
bit-for-bit at the executable level identical to the FC3 package. Check for
yourself.
> It doesn't make any sense compared to continuing to allow free
> distribution of an unmodified product without support.
They tried that. Some distributors modified the result AND still called it
Red Hat Linux. This is known as trademark dilution, and is intolerable from
a corporate standpoint.
> > One size does not fit all.
> Right, but you probably no longer even recommend trying on that
> badly-fitting model. And since it now seems unrelated to anything
> you use, you are probably much less motivated to test the upstream
> side which, in case anyone forgets, is what actually makes this
> stuff usable. Dig up one of those prettily-boxed X.0 sets and try
> to run it if you need help remembering what the developers push
> out *before* they get the user feedback.
Since I was a part of the Red Hat Beta Team I installed prior to x.0 releases,
and saw just how much better the x.0 was as a result. Was it perfect? Not
really, but for the most part the x.0 release was a far cry more stable than
three or four beta releases prior, which were just RawHide snapshots.
> If you aren't using
> Fedora now, who is going to supply the wide scale testing that will
> make some future Centos better? Hmmm, maybe Fedora will try to
> re-claim the community now. It will be interesting to see if they
> use their new independence to re-institute point releases or some
> similarly usable product as a reward for the pain of testing the
> initial releases.
I think the idea was to replace the closed, small, Red Hat Beta Team with a
much wider community and open the development up where more testers get a
swing at the codebase. This has happened to a degree. However, the
trademark issue came to a head, and the name had to be different for it to be
a real community release. What's in a name, anyway, if you know the packages
are the same or very close? (I know, marketing people will harangue me for
that....) But apparently there is a perception issue related to 'Red Hat'
versus 'Fedora' (and woe to the pre-existing Fedora Project (not even related
to Linux)).
Had the split not happened I would likely have had to reduce my activities in
the beta process anyway, as it became too time-intensive and more and more
difficult to justify testing releases and using scads of bandwidth
downloading updates where the set of updated packages was basically the whole
distribution. At this point, I really need the stability of the EL line, but
quite honestly can't afford the EL line. And I'm talking stability within a
version. But at the same time I need the flexibility of adding a few things;
like KDE3.4 or later to a dist that ships (and only supports) KDE 3.3.
Modify your RHEL install and Red Hat may refuse to support it; you do so at
your own peril, and at that point you might as well run a community OS
instead.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
