Re: An Open Letter to Red Hat: Guidelines for Fedora Core

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 20:31 -0600, Danny Sauer wrote:
> I thought the whole thing about Fedora was to generate a new numbering 
> scheme that didn't necessarily relate to the enterprise version, and to 
> free RedHat from having to officially support a "community" product?

Well, the #1 reason was trademark.
But this indirectly supported Red Hat's assertion to the USPTO that "we
do not allow freely redistribution of the Red Hat(R) tradmark."

But the reality is that Fedora Core (and not the greater Fedora Project,
which addresses more technical considerations) is still tied to the
development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  If it is not, then RHEL will
suffer as a direct result.

And that means at least 2 x 6-month revisions of Fedora Core will need
to appear to continue the trust.  One like a traditional ".0" to
introduce new features and force people to adopt them, and more of a
".1" that is a maturity beyond that release after issues have been
resolved, and 3rd party libraries/software can be accommodated.

> The version numbering was supposed to stabilize once Fedora developed to the 
> point where it could stand on its own.  Then again, I never thought Redhat 
> had any real scheme to its numbering system, but just semi-randomly 
> incremented the version number to go along with the other distro's 
> semi-random version jumping - so what do I know? :)

No, you are 100% correct.
Red Hat _never_ pre-announced products.
They _never_ guaranteed revisions.
They _never_ had an official release policy.

Of course, the unofficial policy is king.
And it's still alive in Fedora Core.
Why they wish to hide it is beyond me.

There doesn't have to be an "official" policy.
But it hurts Fedora when people installed Fedora Core 2 and didn't
realize it was a radical change from Fedora Core 1.
Traditional, but still unofficial, version-revisioning would help that.

And I suggested that maybe aligning that with the major, planned RHEL
version would help.  So people know that "uh, oh, Fedore Core 5.0 is
out, I ain't going to run it" but that a "Fedora Core 5.1" is more major
possibly a "Fedora Core 5.2" after RHEL 5 was released would mean, "ahh,
it looks like the new GCC/GLibC isn't available yet, so they made a .2
after all."

That's all I'm looking for.  So in this case, I'd call Fedora Core 4 as
Fedora Core 5.0 instead.
It doesn't have to resemble what RHEL 5 might be at all, but it does
warn people that things are changing.

> --Danny, who'd heartily back a switch to good ol' reliable SuSE (though I'm 
> digging Gentoo for the time being,

Gentoo was the "ports" distro we needed in the Linux world.  Far too
many people shouve "packages" distros (Fedora, Debian, etc...) down the
throat of application-specific and more single-use solutions and they
are poor compared to a "ports" distro.

> in spite of some of the more fanatical users)

Yep.  Too many Gentoo users assume they are getting a supercharged
street racer.  Reality is that a Corvette with everything (raw torque)
is just as good and more mainstream.

They also compare old "packages" distros to the latest'n greatest
"ports" distro like Gentoo.  There are still people living in the pre-
UP2DATE/YUM/APT Red Hat world, and it's scary because some of them still
support Red Hat Linux 7.3 and 9 systems on the Internet, but don't know
about Fedora Legacy.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                  b.j.smith@ieee.org 
---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Community software is all about choice, choice of technology.
Unfortunately, too many Linux advocates port over the so-called
"choice" from the commercial software world, brand name marketing.
The result is false assumptions, failure to focus on the real
technical similarities, but loyalty to blind vendor alignments.



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