RFC: Making the xfs font server optional in Fedora Core and its derivatives.

[Mike A. Harris]

Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 22:39 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> To be fair Mike carefully avoided talking about RHEL, and the major
>> offenders are in the entreprise space 
> 
> True, but it would still be quite good to know how affected
> Fedora would be. RHEL is a different bowl of wax :)

RHEL and Fedora are from the same code base, so they're
both equally affected or non-affected.  What is different
perhaps, is how people _use_ each OS.

Whatever we change in Fedora, will end up becoming "the
new way things work" in the next RHEL release.  So whatever
solution is decided upon will affect both Fedora Core 6
and RHEL-$next-generation users/customers equally.

For the RHEL case, some customers may not be ready and/or
willing to migrate their custom applications for years,
and may stay using RHEL4 or RHEL3 for example, or even
migrate to a non-RH OS.  What business impact that may
have is hard to say.  It's possible the number of systems
out there where this is a problem may be significantly
small in the grand scheme of things.  I'm not sure how
that could be measured without just doing it and finding
out after the fact.  ;o)

The same situation exists for Fedora, only there's no
business factors to consider, but rather community-factors.
If someone has an app, or apps that they expect to be
able to use for years to come, and they have trouble with
getting them running in FC6, they might stay with FC5 or
switch distros or something - if they don't feel like
configuring everything manually for themselves.

The big puzzle IMHO, is:  Just how many applications out
there, and just how many users, will be affected by this,
even in a small way?

Hard to say, but we'll find out soon enough I suppose. ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.