Community involvement? Compared to other distros ...

Posted May 28, 2004 18:45 UTC (Fri) by ranger (guest, #6415)
Parent article: Fedora: looking forward

On the participation page, we see that at present we may file bugs (as we've been able to do for most distros for years).

In future (it's said "soon" for over 3 months now), we will have CVS access.

Eventually, we will be able to build packages for Fedora (there is no mention of which packages the community will be allowed to help maintain, but it seems to lean towards only packages which aren't already in Fedora).

Let's compare that to another popular distribution:

1)CVS access, with commit access for trusted contributors (available in different forms for a number of years already, contributor commit access is about a year old).

2)Development discussion wiki (in addition to mailing lists), available for about a year.

3)A build cluster accessible by contributors (available for about 4 months, before that there was a single build machine for community contributors).

4)Packages in the main distribution maintained by community contributors, in most cases contributors who use the package (in the case of server packages) in production environments.

So, I still don't see the advantage to using the development tree for a linux distro I couldn't afford, and most of my clients can't either.

So, for the clients that can afford such a distro (and require it), I will continue to maintain my own packages of some server software (for instance that actually work with Red Hat's Cluster Manager where thier packages don't) until contributions are welcomed.

(so, "we" above may be taken to mean "people who haven't tried other community-oriented distributions")