The Future Of Fedora Gets Debated, Again

Being hotly discussed this weekend within the Fedora development camp is in regards to the future direction of the Linux distribution.

Tomas Radej, a developer at Red Hat issuing a statement from the position of a Fedora contributor/community member rather than his employer, volleyed a long message on the Fedora devel list about "where are we going?"

Radej has witnessed that most of the Fedora mailing list discussions end up degrading into scolding and personal insults rather than accepting constructive criticism, which he views as making Fedora increasingly fragmented and inconsistent. He also relays views that Fedora may be fantastic for pushing along new, bleeding-edge Linux features, but the community-based distribution just doesn't work. Radej writes, "I am just worrying that if there is no change in how Fedora is done, it will be harder and harder for the community to thrive, and I wouldn't like that. So, through this e-mail addressed to all the Fedora community, I am seeking support for a movement, both collective and individual, that would improve communication, cooperation and generally the life of Fedora on the most fundamental basis."

Some users on the list were quick to chime in that there should be a "Fedora LTS" release to provide longer term support and stability for certain releases rather than constantly pushing out major updates every 6~12 months. For those wanting stability, there is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its derivatives like Scientific Linux and CentOS), but others responded to that in that those enterprise Linux distributions don't often have the very latest software.

Other pain points expressed about Fedora come down to the usual API/ABI breakage and there not being stability/persistence/sustainability at the user-interface level between releases.

While there's been about four dozen messages in this thread since Friday, there's no clear consensus with - as usual - most factions just attacking the other factions' views.