On 9/12/05, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi > > http://www.nascencetech.com/newvillageboy/2005/09/05/full-review-fedora-core-4/ > > If anyone is willing to pick this up and respond to the comments, go > ahead. Not much to tackle here here's my email to the author <begin transmission> I just read your review and I'd like to take a moment to give you some background and updates on some of the negative points you bring up about your fc4 experience. Its a pretty well reasoned review overall, and I appreciate the effort you made to identify your personal experience with KDE and potential personal bias right upfront. "This being my first experience with Fedora Core, I was surprised and annoyed to find that the only native Linux filesystems available for selection were ext2 and ext3. My main Linux machines are running Gentoo and Kubuntu and all of them are either using ReiserFS or XFS. The main reason for giving up ext3 is performance, or rather the lack of it. A more detailed analysis of this can be found here." Making a choice as to which filesystems to support is a complicated decision. Performance in different circumstances is one thing to consider, but its also important to look at maintainability as well as integration of the filesystem with other aspects of the system. How well is the filesystem supported in the mainline kernel? How well does the filesystem support other key aspects of the operating system? I'm not going to try to debate benchmarks with you, instead I'll point out that the default filesystem in Fedora needs to be able to work reliably with other features such as selinux. The alternative filesystems you mention each have their own strengths, but fail to meet the integration and reliability needs of Fedora Core as a whole. As you can see from the unofficial fedora faq, people can get access to these filesystems but they aren't presented to users by default. I hope you appreciate the logic in that. For the unsuspecting user who doesn't know anything about filesystem differences, it makes the most sense to streamline the install process with the filesystem that has the confidence of the distribution developers who will be responding to problems. For more experienced users who can support themselves or who can work with upstream if a problem arises, we can definitely do a better job of documenting how you get access to those additional choices. The process for how the release notes are written has undergone a transition and will be under more direct control from active community writers. Some of the fedorafaq.org material about how to enable this alternative filesystems could very well make it into the release notes for fc5 in the new process: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/ReleaseNotes/Beats You'll notice there is a "filesystems" beat listed and a slot open. You wouldn't happen to know someone interesting in patrolling that beat would you? "As mentioned above, FC4 lacks certain applications and libraries that do not come under any bona fide Open Source Initiative-approved licenses. A number of these are pervasive enough that they have become essential parts of any desktop system: 1. Java support 2. Macromedia Flash support in Firefox 3. MP3 support 4. Producer 3D support for NVidia and ATI cards" This is a much tougher issue because of Red Hat's managerial role, the project has to respect the opinion of Red Hat's legal counsel and avoid opening up legal liability for Red Hat. I assure you, no one is particularly thrilled with not being able to direct users to 3rd party's who provide the applications. Okay well, I'm sure there are certain developers who would love it if addon hardware drivers would stop being used completely because the amount of system instability and bugreports that result...but we all know thats not going to stop happening. Yes, Fedora Core and Fedora Extras are dedicated to providing 100% open source functionality but the project also realizes that there are gaps in the technology we are able to provide. The project is trying to walk the line as best it can, and there have been on-going conversations to better define exactly what that line is. One of the results of discussion is the FC4 release note errata which provides a link to fedorafaq.org for users to find answers to commonly asked questions. http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/errata/ I expect a similar pointer to an unofficial faq to be provided in the fc5 notes unless of course the legal landscape changes in the meantime. "One MAJOR grouse I have is the inclusion of the up2date icon that appears automatically after installation. It maintains that I have no updates necessary, which I found suspicious as FC4 had been released for almost 3 months. Further checking on the Unofficial Fedora FAQ website revealed that up2date still works but "it no longer uses the Red Hat Network (RHN). However, with Fedora, it's better to use yum to get updates, instead of up2date." Now, that sounds like a good reason as any to dump up2date and just create a GUI front-end for the command line tool yum instead. Issuing "yum update" for the first time revealed a whopping 131 packages to be updated, including some rather critical ones for Firefox, for example. In this respect, the up2date status notification that "no updates (are) available" sounds almost malicious." Sadly, there is a bug in up2date/rhn-applet that is misparsing the configuration files. The ability to use the same metadata and configuration files as yum was added before fc4 but there was an unexpected problem found after fc4 branched from development. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=161071 I have not personally seen a written communication saying that up2date/rhn-applet are going to be removed in fc5, but I do believe people are working on a replacement gui. If I had a better sense as to where development on the new codebase stood I'd give you a reference to it. There has also been an effort to better document how to use yum in the near term. http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/index.html I hope these answers have helped. With your permission I'd like to repost this conversation to the fedora-marketing list to make sure that the marketing team has a chance to correct any factual mistakes and to make sure I have not mis-interpreted the project's position on any of these issues. -jef -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
