Early thoughts on FC3

[Preston Crawford]

On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 23:06, K.M.Zammi Kahan wrote:
> Hi Pals,
> 
>             Ive been using Redhat since release 6 and appreciate it is
> improved a lot along with the rest of the open source community.
> Currently Im using FC test 2 and planning to upgrade to test 3 during
> the next weekendJ. Some of the features that I like to see in the next
> release of Fedora (FC3J),
> 
> 1. Integrated system configuration interface.
> 
>     Although FC has all required config tools, integrated interface
> needed for centralized configuration.
> 
> 2. Incorporate some multimedia tools like Xine/ Mplayer, K3B etc. By
> the time we will have more option like Vediolans VLC Player, Helix
> player as well. 

This won't happen (at least from what I understand) and for good reason.
Fedora is trying to be completely free and unfettered so that someone
could take Fedora and repackage it as something else without any legal
entanglements and without Red Hat the company being liable for anything
illegal finding its way into the distro. A sure-fire way to do this is
to include Xine and Mplayer. The main reason being that they'd
inevitably have to include codecs that aren't "above board" (kind of
like how you have to install xmms-mp3 separately. I'd rather it stayed
the way it is, personally.

> 3. Some missing plug-ins like (Flash, JRE etc). Today readers like
> acobat reader & Chm reader (xchm) etc also playing a big role.

Again, I disagree. Fedora isn't meant to be an out of the box
dummy-proof distro that mimics Windows XP. It's meant to be a stable,
yet testing bed for Red Hat's integration of GNU/Linux with OSS to
produce a distro. Including Java, Flash, etc. is once again a possible
licensing issue (as I understand it, don't shoot me if I'm wrong), but
even worse it means that semi-proprietary software is being installed by
default. 

> 4. Independent default art-work theme than Redhats default art-work
> theme.  What about eye-candy desktop for home usersJ??. If both
> GTK/GTK+ and Qt programs can have same look & feel much better.

Huh? Isn't Red Hat/Fedora already eye candy as far as Linux Distros go?
What are you looking for exactly? 

> 5. Improved main menu (Better categorization and program description
> will help user to locate the required program quicker).

Agreed.

> 6. Some stuff like PHP development tools, open source portal etc.
> Apache has more interesting projects to be considered.

Once again, I totally disagree. I couldn't disagree more heartily. I
think Fedora should include all those things a user might typically use
in a Linux distribution. The Kernel, X, standard apps, standard servers
(Apache, Samba, etc.) and that's about it. I like it the way it is
currently. Where does it end if you start including portals and stuff
like that? Should it have Zope? Struts? jakarta-commons? Beanutils? Do
you even know what those are? If you do, good for you, if you don't then
that's precisely whey they shouldn't be included. If I want Beanutils or
Struts I can go get them myself and install them myself. I'm a big boy.
Fedora doesn't have to include every piece of OSS on earth. SuSE already
handles that.

Preston