A couple of points about Fedora, YUM, and RPM.
1) Fedora was the outgrowth of RHL. However, Red Hat blundered when they
stopped selling RHL as an entry level product with by far the
largest mindshare
in the Linux and business community. If Fedora was to be
equivalent to or a
replacement for RHL, it should have been stable, usable, fast,
and have a longer
lifecycle. Customers were confused and confused customers look elsewhere
for solutions, hence the growth of Gentoo, Ubuntu, SuSE, etc.
Fedora has become the Red Hat beta (alpha) for RHEL. It has become far
more difficult to support, update, upgrade, etc. than it should
be based on its
RHL ancestry.
This has really cost Red Hat mindshare, but not their bottom line
which is supported
by the Enterprise and RHEL.
2) Since Red Hat 8 or 9, RPM has had issues with Berkeley DB
including lockups and
__db* files that have to be manually deleted if updates crash or
you CTRL-C while
doing an RPM. This has apparently never been fixed.
3) Fedora supports upgrades, but this is difficult and often does not
work. It took me
nearly 20 HOURS to upgrade from FC5 x86_64 to FC6 x86_64 on my laptop.
4) Doing a query for packages shows ONE version of a program, but if
you try to
remove it, you find you have TWO. How many packages on an x86_64 platform
do you need that support both architectures? Can this be
minimized? Can the
the tools better support multiple packages instead of a default
"fail" mode....
5) Yum is a good updater, but has become slow and has many issues. My FC6
x86_64 boxes fail nearly every time I do an update because of
missing packages.
- 1 missing package, the entire update fails by default
- updates fail, but the packages are found on the update sites
- I have had yum crash with a core dump leaving a mess to clean up
- if you run low on disk space updates are a real pain
My wife and kids use Fedora and now Knoppix. They like Linux, but I
have to maintain over 6 computers (PII/366 to x86_64 Athlons) at home,
two which are dual boot with XP. Weekly manually fixing yum on each
becomes a real pain.
I understand ESR's frustration with Fedora as I often share it as
well. I had a manager who said "perception is reality". I think this
is the case with Fedora. It is getting a bad rap due to the
perception of problems, mainly difficulty with MP3/multimedia and
updates. Fedora is losing mindshare and marketshare (remember it WAS
RHL at one time and to many, Red Hat Linux WAS Linux).
This has been a good thread. I hope it serves as a wake up call to
the Fedora developers and their sponsors, especially Red Hat.
