grip being removed [Re: rawhide report: 20050120 changes]

Rahul Sundaram rahulsundaram at yahoo.co.in
Fri Jan 28 09:10:34 UTC 2005


Hi
> 
> I don't know. The more I think about it, the less
> excited I get. Perhaps 
> someone can share a more rosy picture of how moving
> packages to Fedora 
> Extras is supposed to make the users' lives so much
> easier. Anyone care 
> to bite?
> 

I do.  Fedora core should only include one default
program for each kind of task overall. there might be
a few exceptions like including say nano as well as
vim but having 5 different browsers and calling in
fedora "core" doesnt make any sense at all

Fedora extras and alternatives should have all the
other stuff  but can be integrated with anaconda if
thats going to ease the split up.

fedora core being limited to one or two cds has the
following advantages

* security - people tend to install whatever comes
with their distro. users tend to do this because they
might not know whats optional. providing the defaults
would help having less stuff installed on their
machines which is potentialy more secure

* updates - fedora provides updates not only for bug
fixes and security updates but also for adding new
features. basically whenever a new upstream release is
being made for stuff included in fedora, the project
strives to release that as an update. this tends to
add  up to gigabytes over a particular release and
lifecycle. by reducing the amount of packages, end
users will have less stuff to update. this also helps
them manage their systems more easily


* downloads - fedora core attracts a good amount of
users completely new to Linux. they will have be happy
to use what is provided within core without having to
make a choice between N number of stuff that seems to
be providing the same thing. having fedora core
limited to a single cd or two is beneficial because
users will potentially have less stuff to download

* retail redistribution - magazines and books will
find it more easy to redistribute a single cd rather
than a whole bunch of them. some choose to modify the
distribution for this purpose. we will ease their pain
and expand the reach of fedora 

* community access - by giving important packages 
over to the community, fedora project would
demonstrate its commitment to allowing everyone to
contribute to it. as a more specific example, KDE
tends to have less integration and changes in fedora
which many people believe is the result of redhat's
focus on gnome. by allowing the community to maintain
the KDE packages in extras, fedora core developers 
can go ahead with what it wants to do with gnome and
the rest of the  community can take care of KDE well.
those who oppose the move because they believe this
will become a political fight should note that fedora
extras can be integrated very well with anaconda and a
subset of fedora extras which includes KDE can be
supplied and follow the same release cycle as fedora
core itself making the transition easy to follow.  

fedora extras shouldnt be treated as something less
important to fedora core. the fedora project should
make sure they have the same kind of quality and
support as fedora core itself. policies should be
formed so that the core developers takes care of
important packages moved to extras till the community
steps up or alteast give a buffer period. the project
should have a publicly documented clear policy of what
core, alternatives and other repos should contain and
how the community can involve themselves in the
maintainance of packages



=====
Regards
Rahul Sundaram


		
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