FC4 good new tech, bad legacy support

[John Summerfied]

Christofer C. Bell wrote:

> 
> The Fedora "Objectives" page[1] does state:

While the objective page does say these things, the fact is some of 
those objectives are in conflict.

"leading edge" software is rarely "robust" or "stable."
"leading edge" compilers likely implement new algorithms, some of what 
are flawed and some of which are implemented badly.
"leading edge" compilers often implement new semantics & syntax, perhaps 
for compilance with new standards. This can cause problems with existing 
software, and is the reason RH shipped two C compilers for a time - one 
for the kernel, one for everything else.

Whatever one's objectives are, it's the nature of things that they will 
often not be met: if they're too easy, there's no challenge.

The problems I've had and which I've seen reported here suggest that on 
FC3 and FC4, the robustness objective is not met, and least, to 
everyone's satisfaction.

If stability and resilience are important, then I still say FC is not 
the platform of choice.

Now, for those with imbedded projects, I think FC and *EL are not good 
choices. The RH-based packages are created for general-purpose 
application with many facilities & features not required for many 
specialist tasks. For those, I suggest looking for a distro targeted to 
those needs, or building from source. That way, you get to enable the 
features you want and eliminate much unwanted bloat.

I used to run RHL 6.2 on a Pentium with 64 Mbytes of RAM, but these days 
my Celeron 1300-based laptop with 256 Mbytes struggles.

And, I used to run a webs server on a 486, 8 Mb RAM and 170 mb of disk. 
It's probably still possible, provided that I build from source. If I 
tried to use RHEL or FC, the dependencies would kill me.






> 
> * "Provide a robust development platform for building software,
> particularly open source software." - Implies some modicum of
> stability.
> 
> * "Establish and implement technical standards for packages to ensure
> quality and consistency of the operating system." - A clear nod to
> stability.
> 
> * "Create an environment where third party packages are easy to add
> and positive encouragement and support exists for third party
> packaging." - Stability is required for this goal to be met.
> 
> * "Form the basis of Red Hat's commercially supported operating system
> products." - Poor quality assurance in Fedora implies poor quality
> assurance in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so poor quality assurance in
> Fedora better not be happening (and I don't think it is).
> 
> * Fedora does not want to be "a dumping ground for unmaintained or
> poorly designed software." - This also implies a robust quality
> assurance process.
> 
> Yes, Fedora is "the basis of Red Hat's commercially supported
> operating system products" and thus it's a moving target -- but this
> does not imply that a given release is to be viewed as unstable or
> that people who experience problems should be told to go elsewhere for
> their Linux experience or to "suck it up and deal."
> 
> As for the person that said it's advertised on Fedora's page that
> users can expect to run into show stopping issues with regularity, I'm
> hard pressed to find that anywhere on the site.  Do you have a pointer
> to it?  (Hint: It's not there because it's not in Red Hat's interest
> to discourage people from using their software).
> 
> [1] http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
> 


-- 

Cheers
John

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