Now: caos and RH

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 08:50:23AM -0600, Chris Spencer told me:
> > > The distribution is cAos (http://caosity.org) and development is moving very
> > > fast with the hopes to create a usable distribution for people to migrate
> > > their EOL'ed RedHat systems to.
> 
> Of course Fedora Legacy is keeping the unsupported distributions secure
> and Fedora Core is being produced by (and is critical for) Red Hat.

Fedora Legacy is doing a great service to EOL'ed RH users without a doubt! I
for one am very grateful to that project.

> It seems like a waste to reinvent the wheel.

Not really... Let me explain. Reinventing wheels happen all over the open 
source community, and it is one of the things that makes open source software 
so diverse. We don't settle unless something is perfect.

YUM is a perfect example, even though there was Apt, AutoRPM, AutoUpdate, 
GRAB, etc... YUM was still developed. Today, I think of it as the best RPM
manager available. And being the author of one of the others, I am even 
biased! ;)

More examples include the various httpd's, ftpd's, WM's, editors, MTA's, 
etc... ;) The point is that wheel reinventing is a fact of Open Source and it 
occurs when there is a need.

RedHat for many (many) years was a perfect solution to most Linux users. There 
was no need to research anything else because it was the "sweet spot" distro. 
But they decided to change their support models and leave a very large niche 
in the community. Many people in the community see Fedora as the life vest, 
but I don't.  

Fedora is a great solution for what it was designed to do. It was not however
designed to be a viable long term production system, it is not in their stated
goals(1). Fedora is designed to allow the community to take part in the 
development process of their leading edge technology. RedHat has made it much 
easier to install and work with then its predecessor (Rawhide), but there are 
no plans for longevity, and no migration paths (as it has been described to me 
by RedHat). Yes, the community may create initiatives to provide longer term
support of the releases, but that conflicts with its design goals as I see it.

So, my point is that Fedora, RHEL and caos are different solutions with very 
different goals and that wheel reinvention is not a bad thing.

Hope you don't mind me using this opportunity to speak my mind, and try to
clarify things.

Greg

1. http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html
-- 
Greg M. Kurtzer
http://runlevelzero.net/
http://caosity.org/
http://warewulf-cluster.org/