Paul A Houle wrote:
I think a lot of the people who have problems with Fedora would be
happy to have an alternative ("fork" distribution) to work on.
It depends on your problems. If you want to say fix bugs, a fork wouldnt
be necessary. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
It would be trivial to develop a distribution that consists of a
subset of Fedora Core packages plus packages from Fedora Extras: the
advantage here is that users can plug into the existing system for
yum, so there's no need to work on security updates, plus users get
100% compatibility with Fedora. It would be easy to address common
complaints about Fedora such as "bloat" (Two desktop environments,
who knows how many GB of internationalization files), packages that
make it difficult to install your own software (OpenOffice). It might
be a bit silly, but I'm still missing 'fortune' and the games package
that came with Slackware.
One of the FC5 goals is to trim down Fedora to reasonable default. When
Anaconda gets a yum backend would make it easy enough to mix and match
what packages you want. Its also a goal of the Live CD project to make
it easy to create derivatives which are compatible with Fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LiveCD
In the age of BitTorrent, the task of distributing the new
distribution would be easy as well: set up a tracker and a few seeds
with good connectivity, and the problem is solved.
(Actually, that scares me a little -- what if somebody spins a
'black hat linux' with a bad ssh that misrepresents itself as FC and
spreads the .torrent file around the net?)
Pretty good question. The legal protection against people
misrepresenting Fedora is through trade marks
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/
This kind of project would make Extras more relevant: people who
want to put packages in alternative distributions would have a
motivation to get packages into Extras so they can benefit from the
update network.
I believe with the current work in Anaconda helps a lot in blurring out
the differences between core and extras. If someone takes up the project
of spinning off Fedora Extras repository into ISO images it pretty much
makes it irrelevant whether its in core or extras for a lot of people.
Many of us can imagine our own personal perfect Fedora-derived
distribution, but really the challenge is to think of a coherent
mission for an alternative distribution (or series of alternative
distributions) that would be compelling to enough people that it could
get some momentum. Any ideas?
Lets see
* KDE or XFCE based Fedora derivative.
* Fedora for low end systems
* Hardened version of Fedora with strict or MLS policy by default
Things like that. It would be interesting if you can work within the
frame work of Fedora, get a cvs space and keep it compatible rather
than fork it right away but you are free to do that neverthless
regards
Rahul
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