I read the article by ESR, and agree that it was difficult to tell from his rant exactly what problem it was that he had encountered. Personally, I haven't found that yum has deteriorated in any way; it seems to me much better than the update program I used with the old RH distributions. I ran Ubuntu for a while recently (it was on a second-hand laptop I bought) and it didn't seem to me any better or worse than Fedora in this respect. I went back to Fedora because I was running that on other machines, and it seemed easier to run the same distribution on all. (What struck me forcibly was that there was much more difference between KDE an Gnome than there was between different distributions.) However, I do feel that the hostile reaction to ESR is counter-productive. One weakness as I see it with Fedora is that there is no mechanism for feedback. Nobody knows as far as I can see what problems people meet, unless they post bugzillas (which in my experience is a fairly useless exercise). While the documentation project is certainly a worthy aim it seems to me to have become excessively bureaucratic, with more discussion about the techniques of documentation than the actual content of the documents. (In my experience beautifully produced documents are if anything less likely to be helpful than the simplest of texts.) -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
