Views from an Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Fedora migrator

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:55:02AM -0400, Digimer wrote:
> I would never fault someone for using Debian. I would like to comment on
> a couple of things though;
> 
> I'm active in the Fedora community and from everything I've seen in the
> last two years, Red Hat is very hands-off Fedora. If anything, I've seen
> more stress from RHEL developers trying to meet Fedora people's
> expectations than the other way around.
> 
> I think what people see is that Red Hat employees *many* people who
> contribute the Red Hat. This can be seen as a form of control. It's not
> a fair terms though... There is guidance though. For example, Red Hat
> will say to their devs; "There is a duplication of effort in these two
> projects", arrange meetings between the devs of the different projects
> and see if they can find a way to work together.
> 
> I see this as providing resources and guidance, more than control, but I
> could also understand why people might see this as control. I'd only ask
> people interested in this to take the time to look at some fedora-hosted
> projects and see how the community works, then make up their mind.
> 
> Again though; This is not to take away from the viability of Debian as a
> distro. I still stand by my argument that it is a server distro first,
> given it's dedication to stability over features (the same view I have
> for CentOS/RHEL), but of course people can use server distros as their
> workstation OS just fine.

If Debian was a server OS it would not include most of the packages
that it does.  It includes almost everything you could imagine wanting.
If someone wants to maintain it, it can be included.  A server OS would
focus on server things and not allow too much creep of unnecesary things.

I think it is crazy to not want your desktop to be stable.  Just think
how many people have stuck with windows XP for the desktop.  It's pretty
stable by now and they know what to expect.  That does NOT make windows
XP a server OS.

Desktop OS does not require having the latest version of everything,
stability be damned.  Never mind what Ubuntu thinks.  Fedora is last
I checked rather explicitly labeled as a development system for RHEL,
and not expected to be stable (and new release often are very much not
stable).  Fedora includes things that are far from ready knowwingly with
the hope that getting some use will help shake out the bugs.  That is
great for developers, not great for users, making fedora unsuitable as
a desktop OS (never mind even imaginging a server OS) for most people.

Adding things to a release that are known to be in an unuable state
(which Fedora has done fairly recently) by redhat, to me is not something
that makes for something in the best interest of the community of users
(unless only developers get to count as part of the community, which
does seem to match my understanding of the purpose of the fedora project).

So based on my experience with redhat (which I used as a desktop from
2.0 to 6.0, and paid money for many CD sets of along the way) and RHEL
and centos (which is not directly redhat) and reading about the choices
made in fedora, and having tried to file bug reports (even providing
a patch to fix an obvious problem) even with help from someone I knew
that worked at redhat in their support department (the bug report was
never accepted), I have been thoroughly convinced that if you don't have
a RHEL support contract, your opinion matters not to redhat.  This is
fair enough, they are in the business of making money after all.  I also
still don't think RPM is a particularly good design for package handling.
Making packages is way too much work and too error prone.

Redhat does support lots of useful development (gcc, glibc (well
somewhat), and a bunch of other stuff).  That doesn't make their
distributions good though.  They are pretty good at fixing bugs for
people on support contract though.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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