Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> 
>> The reason for Fedora is to find out what things work. But why must
>> Fedora work for everyone? 
> 
> Who's going to learn how to administer RHEL for their servers if they
> use some other distro with a wildly different management style on their
> own desktop?
> 
They might try one of the free distributions that more closely
resembles what you would find in RHEL. Again, you want Fedora to be
something it is not, and is not intended to be.

>> The lack of support for your position would tend to indicate that
>> Fedora is meeting the needs of most of the people here.
> 
> I'd categorize it as saying it doesn't meet the needs of most people who
> could be using Linux as their desktop machine.  The people 'here' are a
> small subset who obviously are more tolerant and willing to put up with
> breakage.  Having to resort to mailing lists to get things working at
> all or recover after updates isn't something we should consider mainstream.
> 
Why should Fedora try to meet most people's needs? It is aimed at
the audience you find here. It is not intended to "meet the needs of
most people who could be using Linux as their desktop machine." Why
should it have to? This is not Windows - Fedora is not trying to
meet the needs of everyone, or even most people.

>> We all agree
>> that it is not meeting your needs. But why should Fedora have to
>> change to meet your needs is the change is not going to be what most
>> of the users here want?
> 
> They don't 'have' to change, and I'm not demanding any change but
> everyone should be realistic about the usefulness of the disto.  If a
> goal of fedora is to encourage people to become familiar with RedHat
> style system administration (and I think it should be, since this makes
> the path to RHEL easier), they are not making a product that a large
> audience can use for real work and are thus limiting this exposure.
> 
That is one of the problems - what you think the goal should be, and
what the goal is are not the same. The goal is to test bleading edge
software, not to encourage people to become familiar with the RedHat
style of system administration.

All your arguments boil down to that Fedora is not the tool you want
it to be. But Fedora is not meant to be that tool in the first
place. So arguments that it isn't suitable for this or that function
should first consider if it was intended to provide that function.
If it was not, then why should it be expected to? You have been
pointed to distributions that do provide what you want. So why not
use one of them, and let Fedora pursue its own goal? It is filling
the needs of its intended audience. Why should it be expected to do
more then that?  (I have tried presenting this point several
different ways...)

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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