John Summerfied wrote:
Christofer C. Bell wrote:
The Fedora "Objectives" page[1] does state:
While the objective page does say these things, the fact is some of
those objectives are in conflict.
"leading edge" software is rarely "robust" or "stable."
You base this hypothesis on what? Leading-edge can be both robust and
stable. It just depends on how thorough and patient the programmers
are. Otherwise, the programmers need to label their improvements as
untested betas, not full blown releases.
"leading edge" compilers likely implement new algorithms, some of what
are flawed and some of which are implemented badly.
See previous. Make a command line switch to use older algorithms or
newer "untested" algorithms before thinking those new routines are ready
for release. Even a race car needs tweaking before it's ready to race.
"leading edge" compilers often implement new semantics & syntax,
perhaps for compilance with new standards. This can cause problems
with existing software, and is the reason RH shipped two C compilers
for a time - one for the kernel, one for everything else.
Intelligence would dictate that throwing out the old methods "cold
turkey" to be unwise and arrogant, as those standards committees
probably rarely get out to breath fresh air and do not comprehend the
real world. Weaning people off bad practices is a wiser approach,
especially if the older methods worked fine for years.
Whatever one's objectives are, it's the nature of things that they
will often not be met: if they're too easy, there's no challenge.
Agreed, but one can find that learning goes better if taken a step at a
time, rather than making an olympic leap into the deep end. Much
improvement can be missed if you jump too far.
The problems I've had and which I've seen reported here suggest that
on FC3 and FC4, the robustness objective is not met, and least, to
everyone's satisfaction.
Perhaps not, or maybe it's not paid attention to enough in development.
If stability and resilience are important, then I still say FC is not
the platform of choice.
Then the FC project needs to re-think its objectives, as it has not met
them satisfactorally in version 4, in my opinion. Frankly, I think
everything 4 is can still be achieved without the problems. Perhaps a
4.5 might be in order before going all bonzai on a new version. For
everything 4 has is magnificent, for everything it is lacking is poorly
thought out.
Now, for those with imbedded projects, I think FC and *EL are not good
choices. The RH-based packages are created for general-purpose
application with many facilities & features not required for many
specialist tasks. For those, I suggest looking for a distro targeted
to those needs, or building from source. That way, you get to enable
the features you want and eliminate much unwanted bloat.
For those uses I might agree on many points. However, one may also like
the ease of use RedHat was originally popular for.
I used to run RHL 6.2 on a Pentium with 64 Mbytes of RAM, but these
days my Celeron 1300-based laptop with 256 Mbytes struggles.
And, I used to run a webs server on a 486, 8 Mb RAM and 170 mb of
disk. It's probably still possible, provided that I build from source.
If I tried to use RHEL or FC, the dependencies would kill me.
What I was doing wasn't anything weird or special. In fact, the
software I was attempting to install was pretty generic, yet FC4 failed
(in my opinion) as a Perl development platform. That's all, and that is
significant. Why are some people being so "fanboy" about this? Isn't
the intent of Fedora to build a better Linux OS release? Shouldn't
every popular use be considered? All I want is a better Fedora for the
future, I don't need to worship it or take offense if someone criticizes
an aspect of it.
* "Provide a robust development platform for building software,
particularly open source software." - Implies some modicum of
stability.
* "Establish and implement technical standards for packages to ensure
quality and consistency of the operating system." - A clear nod to
stability.
* "Create an environment where third party packages are easy to add
and positive encouragement and support exists for third party
packaging." - Stability is required for this goal to be met.
* "Form the basis of Red Hat's commercially supported operating system
products." - Poor quality assurance in Fedora implies poor quality
assurance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so poor quality assurance in
Fedora better not be happening (and I don't think it is).
* Fedora does not want to be "a dumping ground for unmaintained or
poorly designed software." - This also implies a robust quality
assurance process.
Yes, Fedora is "the basis of Red Hat's commercially supported
operating system products" and thus it's a moving target -- but this
does not imply that a given release is to be viewed as unstable or
that people who experience problems should be told to go elsewhere for
their Linux experience or to "suck it up and deal."
As for the person that said it's advertised on Fedora's page that
users can expect to run into show stopping issues with regularity, I'm
hard pressed to find that anywhere on the site. Do you have a pointer
to it? (Hint: It's not there because it's not in Red Hat's interest
to discourage people from using their software).
[1] http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
