RH Decisions (was Re: APT, Yum and Red Carpet)

[Rik van Riel]

On 14 Aug 2003, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> Kyle Maxwell wrote:
> >But some decisions are starting to leave me in the cold
> 
> Err..well...i'm going to give red hat a pretty long lead time on when I
> expect them to get this whole external communication thing close to the
> right ballpark. 

One of the reasons why things are taking a while is that everybody
was away, first in Otawa for OLS and then at Linuxworld in California.

> I think it helps to think of this beta as still a traditional
> beta....the community project still needs a lot of flushing out...as a
> concept its alpha.

Indeed, since the project went live around the same time as the
Severn beta (beta == code freeze) this time the core release
probably won't have all that much community input.  Personally I
hope this will result in a culture of using external repositories
so the core distribution for the next version could be shrunk ;))

Of course I'm a kernel guy and mostly an onlooker when it comes
to the distribution.  I wouldn't be surprised if the people who
are doing the actual work of putting together the distro ended
up taking the decision of putting more cool stuff in their own
repository, grabbing it from external repositories.  On the other
hand, I wouldn't be surprised by a "move stuff into external
repositories and out of the core distro" movement, either.

I am very curious which of the two will happen, though...

> I can just imagine how much internal discussion is being generated....

We are trying to discuss all the technical things in public,
though.  On the rhl-devel-list and also in threads on this
list.

> and I can only hope the hatters show as good a sense of knowing how to
> schedule a "release" of the project framework as they do about pushing
> out distro releases.

That is one of our requirements.  We want this distribution
to be at least as good for our own personal use as Red Hat
Linux has been.  That doesn't just mean a regular stable
release with "fresh bits"; for me personally it also means
being able to point the same update tool I use for the core
distribution at other repositories, like freshrpms, fedora
and a repository with some of my own RPMS.

Note that even though I work at Red Hat, I don't think I
will be trying to get the RPMS I am interested in into the
core distribution.  I want to publish the stuff I want to
do in an external repository in order to:
1) have freedom on how I maintain things
2) run my own release schedule, independant of the core
   distribution
and, most importantly
3) not hold up the core distribution when my packages lag
   because I'm busy with the kernel

In short, I want to have all the benefits of a stable and
regularly updated core distribution, while not adding the
maintenance burden of my personal packages wishlist to
that core distribution.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan