Some notes on Fedora and Mono

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 06/23/2009 11:02 PM, Bryan Lunduke wrote:

> 
> Do you happen to know the download numbers for the Live CD vs the DVD
> versions?

In short: More users use DVD images

More details:

Accurate numbers are pretty hard to get. Our torrent shows a much higher
proportion of users downloading the DVD image and that has been
consistent for the previous releases as well.

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org:6969/

We can gather some more general stats for downloads via mirror manager
but of course we have no way of easily counting the downloads via
mirrors directly or other forms of redistribution such as magazines
around the world which generally are known to prefer to distribute DVD's
since they hold more packages and there is little to no difference in
the cost of media replication. The fuzziness around this is the reason
why we prefer to count IP connections via yum instead but this doesn't
give you the media preferences. Note that users installing via network
installation would get the same defaults as users downloading the DVD
image.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics

There is a ongoing project developed elsewhere for a distribution
neutral opt-in way to gather stats on installed packages. Perhaps that
will give us more information on what users prefer in the future.

"This was actually a news item some time back.  I do not have a link at
present, so I cannot accurately quote the specific people and time-line,
but this was, indeed, something that has happened.  And is just one of
many items that makes one pause."

How about some references to this claim related to Adobe Flash? Adobe
Flash is proprietary software and that is enough reason to exclude it
from Fedora. Why would any other reason be even necessary? It would have
nice to include any such links to the show notes. See, I do pay attention.


> So.  What you are saying is... that replacing software with different
> software in a distro is zero work?
> 
> You know better.

Fedora Project isn't really spending anytime reinventing working
software in the form of Gnote. Gnote was developed independently. Any
interested volunteer is free to maintain any free and open source
software (assuming no legal issues) within Fedora. The release
engineering and desktop teams evaluate the set of existing apps in the
repository and make some of them the default where it makes sense and
yes it does make sense for the Live CD to have a smaller application
like Gnote (considering dependencies) because of space constraints. In
the case of Gnote, the effort to do so isn't big at all since Gnote will
automatically import the notes and the interface is the same. So users
won't nice much of a difference except overall fewer resources being
used by Gnote. Is such valid reasons for distribution defaults really a
reason to accuse a project and it's developers of being incompetent or
liars or comparing the process to DRM ? I understand both of you like
some of the Mono apps and it is completely ok to say regardless of
Fedora Project's reasons for picking whatever defaults they did, I
prefer a different set of apps ( KDE instead of GNOME or Banshee instead
of Rhythm box etc and) and that's why we offer thousands of applications
in the repository and the ability to create spins or remixes easily but
I think you folks went way over the top this time without much of a
ground to do so. I would be happy to discuss any concerns you both might
still have.

Rahul