On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 00:54, Mike A. Harris wrote: > In my personal opinion, I fully expect to see our Fedora Core > releases be as high if not higher quality as Red Hat Linux was. > It has the same Red Hat people working on it as it always has > afterall, only now we're working more closely with the community > to improve the OS all that much more. And with the community > participating in the future, both with suggestions for > improvement, as well as making some of those improvements and > contributing them, and once the infrastructure is in place to > allow externally maintained packages, I believe that a high > quality OS will not only continue to be produced, but it will be > higher quality as the more skilled people get involved with the > project. Back in the spring, I raised a big stink (along with a few others) about what Red Hat was doing with their product strategy. Not only that, but it felt to me like the quality of the product was slipping. So, after playing around with Gentoo and Debian, I settled down with SuSE 8.2. And it's been great; I am very happy with it. On the other hand, their user community is BORING. This sort of post would be unwelcome on their list. (It's "advocacy," by their definition, and that is seriously frowned upon.) So their (high-volume) list ends up being nothing but a litany of easy questions on how to do things. I guess that's fine, but it does nothing for those of us who know how to use Google, and who aren't afraid of reading a HOWTO. So I subscribed to this list to see what was happening in the Red Hat world again. I must confess that even after my bad attitude as to what happened (with the change of direction for RHL), I find myself intrigued with Fedora. I think it could be great, and fix the problems that I felt the product had. 1) Community influence. The community on the Red Hat lists are the best I've seen. There is actual discussion about the issues, and Red Hat employees aren't afraid to jump into the fray. (SuSE has an official "liason" to the list. I assume this because he's the only one who posts.) The officially-stated policy that Fedora's direction will be guided by this community is a HUGE. DEAL. At least to me. You put this mindshare (Red Hat is still always at the top of everyone's supported list) and combine it with the crack shots that hang around here (or at least used to), and you've got a winner. I submitted a bug on 9 that still isn't fixed, but I've always felt like it would be a fairly simple fix if there were just enough hands to get around to it. 2) Stable and Test versions. I just heard about this now, on this thread, and I suspected that this would happen when I first heard about the project. I think this needs to happen, like in the Debian world. (I hear that Gentoo has picked up this concept too.) Having a version for the leading edge, and one for the bleeding edge would go a long way to satisfying the majority of users of Linux. I mean, you're not going to pick up the Debian users. If they're happy running software that's 2-3 years behind in features (though, admittedly, not in securty fixes), then that's fine. But a featureful distro that can be run "safely" or "experimentally" -- directed primary from a community -- without needing to be compiled -- would satisfy a lot of the Gentoo people. I went a couple rounds with (I think) Mike about optimization improvements, and he was right. After I setup prelinking on my RHL9 system, I did indeed see a speedup, and the subjective differences between my "optimized" Gentoo setup and RHL9 were minimal, if any. I think people are waking up to the fact that it's just not worth the time and hassle to compile your own system from source. (Though I can see a real use for it on old hardware, Debian's got that handled pretty well.) Anyway, just a couple thoughts on where this is going. I am very intrigued... dare I say excisted?... about this recent announcement. I downloaded severn in order to try out on a test box (upon which I will try to run Freevo), but I very much look forward to Red Hat's transition to put the majority of the ownership and direction in the hands of the community. Once it hits full release, I will very likely drop it in alongside my preordered SuSE 9, and do another runoff. Bottom line? I just wanted to say that these moves may open "Red Hat" Linux back up to a portion of the community that had moved away, but Red Hat has to make good on the idea of true community involvement in the distro's direction. Regards, dk
