HCL Considered Harmfull [Re: Fedora HCL guide writers?]

[Tommy Reynolds]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005 10:50:49 -0700 Chidananda Jayakeerti
<ajchida at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,

Nice to meet you.  Sorry to be so late responding to your posting,
but I've been away from the office for a week.  And I lost your
original email.  And my dog ate my homework.  Just kidding.

Anyway, I'll make an attempt at answering your question; other
members will probably have different ideas than mine.  That is OK,
I'm just thinking out loud here.

> I have been resorting to "googling" for Fedora HCL due to the lack of
> such a guide. I have a crude list of hardware list built from
> experience. This is in no means a official HCL and has very few
> hardware.

I understand your interest in having a Fedora HCL, so that when you
configure a system you have at least _some_ hope that the result will be
functional.  However, looking at some of the public comments about
past experiences with HCL's are revealing.

I do not think that having an HCL will be a good idea for Fedora.  Red
Hat was able to publish their HCL because one of their business services
was to certify that a certain combination of vendor hardware and
software worked when RH tested it.  They were paid handsomely for this
service. Vendors liked the idea, but the next engineering change to
either the hardware or the software rendered that particular
certification worthless because the entry was actually a tuple:

Certification[N] = [Hardware(Model,ECO,Options), Software
(Version,patch]]

Because of the cost involved, many vendors never re-certified for new
versions.

The HCL also contained some anecdotal entries, of the "this worked for
me" variety.

The end result was the HCL rapidly became stale.  Translation: big
maintenance chore.  Also, it was never intended to be
authoritative, but that's the way it was used.  If someone wanted to
install Linux, they would check the HCL and then panic because their
particular combination was not listed.

In the end, the HCL has languished and gotten only sporadic attention.

Fedora now includes an Installation Guide and Release Notes that
describe the minimal hardware configuration, in generic terms.

Google.com is probably the best solution to this issue; especially given
the short development cycle of the Fedora project.

> However, looking at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129784
> I realise i might as well start off an official one. Are there any
> writiers understaking such a task?
> How do I go about starting one? I could do the SelfIntroduction stuff
> (although i'm not too comfortable reveling my residence address to a
> mailing list :).

We would welcome your contribution to the Docs project.  A
self-introduction is, rather firmly, the most minimal of membership
requirements.  We won't come to your house to check your address, but
notice the section that asks "Why should we trust you?".  

I think an address of at least the city? country? continent? world?
solar system? galaxy? 'verse? is intended to give folks some idea of
whom you are.  Wade, is this right?

Cheers!
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