fedora versus fedora test

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 David.Grudek at anixter.com wrote:

>From the way it is discussed on the site, it seems like the
>fedora project will be one constant beta test for Redhat to
>decide what to put into there enterprise edition.  This does not
>seem to be a bad idea for them but for users that were using
>Redhat 7.3, 8.0, or even 9 will not be able to be sure that it
>is stable enough to run in production..  This seems like Redhat
>just lost there ownership of the project enough that it will
>never be the good product that we have all come to love.  I hope
>I am wrong because I love what Redhat started to do with 8 and
>9.  This was a very big disappointment for me.

Considering the fact that every single package in rawhide is
currently maintained by Red Hat employees, and we are diligently
working every day to improve the Fedora Core release and fix as
many bugs as possible, I'm not sure exactly how "Redhat just lost
there ownership of the project" as you state above.  While we 
have opened up the project to the community, the infrastructure 
is not yet in place to allow external developers to maintain or 
contribute packages, and so for all intents and purposes, Fedora 
Core 1, is very much a distribution developed by Red Hat not much 
differently than Red Hat Linux 9, or Red Hat Linux 8.0, 7.x, etc.

What has changed, is our plans for the future.  We just have not
implemented the ability yet for people to get more directly
involved.  So contrary to what some people out there think,
Fedora Core 1, is not "developed by the community" with zero Red
Hat involvement.  In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth,
it is so far developed by Red Hat as far as package maintenance,
distribution integration and testing, release engineering, etc.
are concerned, however some of the development has been
"influenced" by the community of users interested in the project
and on these lists, because we are all now communicating much
more closely together in these open forums.

We hope to see more and more people become interested in 
communicating ideas, providing feedback, suggestions, 
improvements, patches, etc. and as that happens, the "development 
community" will increase in size and function.  Until we have the 
necessary infrastructure in place to allow external developers 
and contributors to directly contribute and/or maintain packages 
however, Red Hat engineers are currently maintaining everything 
still, and will be until the necessary infrastructure is in 
place.

Once the infrastructure is in place, it wont be a freeforall 
however for totally random people to stuff totally random 
packages into the distribution.  The Fedora website contains 
documentaiton on how the project will be ran, and what things Red 
Hat retains control over under the Fedora project.

The Fedora project is very much not a continuous beta test, and 
in a small way, as a contributor to this project, I'm kindof 
offended that some people seem to think it is such.

In a way, "Rawhide" is somewhat of a continuous beta test, but in 
the sense of individual packages, and not a timestamped 
collection of an entire distribution of packages.  But "Rawhide" 
is not "Fedora Core 1" (the final OS) any more than Rawhide was 
"Red Hat Linux 9".

Some people in the community seem to be quite confused it seems.  
Where that confusion stems from, I'm not sure, however I would 
definitely like to clarify anything if possible.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat