On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 David.Grudek@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: >From the way it is discussed on the site, it seems like the >fedora project will be one constant beta test for Redhat to >decide what to put into there enterprise edition. This does not >seem to be a bad idea for them but for users that were using >Redhat 7.3, 8.0, or even 9 will not be able to be sure that it >is stable enough to run in production.. This seems like Redhat >just lost there ownership of the project enough that it will >never be the good product that we have all come to love. I hope >I am wrong because I love what Redhat started to do with 8 and >9. This was a very big disappointment for me. Considering the fact that every single package in rawhide is currently maintained by Red Hat employees, and we are diligently working every day to improve the Fedora Core release and fix as many bugs as possible, I'm not sure exactly how "Redhat just lost there ownership of the project" as you state above. While we have opened up the project to the community, the infrastructure is not yet in place to allow external developers to maintain or contribute packages, and so for all intents and purposes, Fedora Core 1, is very much a distribution developed by Red Hat not much differently than Red Hat Linux 9, or Red Hat Linux 8.0, 7.x, etc. What has changed, is our plans for the future. We just have not implemented the ability yet for people to get more directly involved. So contrary to what some people out there think, Fedora Core 1, is not "developed by the community" with zero Red Hat involvement. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth, it is so far developed by Red Hat as far as package maintenance, distribution integration and testing, release engineering, etc. are concerned, however some of the development has been "influenced" by the community of users interested in the project and on these lists, because we are all now communicating much more closely together in these open forums. We hope to see more and more people become interested in communicating ideas, providing feedback, suggestions, improvements, patches, etc. and as that happens, the "development community" will increase in size and function. Until we have the necessary infrastructure in place to allow external developers and contributors to directly contribute and/or maintain packages however, Red Hat engineers are currently maintaining everything still, and will be until the necessary infrastructure is in place. Once the infrastructure is in place, it wont be a freeforall however for totally random people to stuff totally random packages into the distribution. The Fedora website contains documentaiton on how the project will be ran, and what things Red Hat retains control over under the Fedora project. The Fedora project is very much not a continuous beta test, and in a small way, as a contributor to this project, I'm kindof offended that some people seem to think it is such. In a way, "Rawhide" is somewhat of a continuous beta test, but in the sense of individual packages, and not a timestamped collection of an entire distribution of packages. But "Rawhide" is not "Fedora Core 1" (the final OS) any more than Rawhide was "Red Hat Linux 9". Some people in the community seem to be quite confused it seems. Where that confusion stems from, I'm not sure, however I would definitely like to clarify anything if possible. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
