In the interest of fairness and balance, I feel compelled to say a few
harsh words about the latest release of Fedora, version 8.
When Fedora Core 2 was released, I branded it "b0rken Core" because it
had a slew of problems (mainly kernel related). Fedora Core 4 had an
even nastier bug that invalidated hard drives, due to a conflict between
the new method used by the kernel disk subsystem to calculate disk
geometries, and userland tools like parted still using the old method.
But with the exception of those two issues, every other release of
Fedora from 1 to 6 inclusive has been excellent. There were few
compatibility issues, the releases were stable - despite the general
"bleeding-edge" status of Fedora, package availability was high -
approaching the level seen at Debian, and the overall presentation was
slick and intuitive.
With the release of Fedora 7 there was a severe issue related to
mkinitrd, LVM and RAID that required manual intervention. The
maintainers sat on the problem for months, despite it being a blocker
that essentially prevented installing or upgrading to F7, for those
affected (including myself). I did what one is supposed to do in the
FOSS community, and /contributed/. The patch I provided solved the
problem, and allowed those held back by this bug to finally proceed,
without requiring manual intervention (important for those unwilling or
unable to do so, since it was fairly technical in nature).
The problem may have been solved, but what concerns me is that the
maintainers didn't seem to be that motivated to do any work, and left
the *entire* process to a voluntary contributor (me). This is worrying,
but I put it down as an anomalous event.
Now we have Fedora 8. I won't mince my words; it sucks.
After what promised to be the best version of Fedora yet, the final
release has, if anything, probably more problems than FC2, and that's
quite an indictment. It seems that F8 is not so much "bleeding edge" as
"bleeding awful". The Fedora maintainers should be ashamed.
Once again, I find myself unable to install Fedora, because of a bug so
fundamental that it stops the installation dead in its tracks. The bug
has not yet been fully diagnosed, but it appears that either the kernel
has a nasty regression, or the sweeping changes made to Anaconda were
not fully tested. Problems of this nature and severity are unacceptable
for a final release IMHO.
However, I was prepared to try to work through this bug, just like the
last time, until I checked the mailing list and discovered that this was
only one of a huge number of problems experienced by many others. What
really concerns me is that most of these problems are manifesting as
users being unable to even install Fedora at all, to a degree I've never
seen before with Fedora, in terms of the number of affected user.
A review of the mailing list also reveals problems with NetworkManager,
Yum and yum-updatesd, broken dependencies in the repos, python, more
general problems with the kernel, Java (Icedtea), audio, NTFS support,
and a range of other issues much larger than I've seen with previous
releases (other than FC2).
Right now, my only upgrade path is a dist-upgrade using yum, but this
method is fraught with difficulties, since it tends to leave a mess of
broken dotfiles that need manual adjustment. On the whole, it would just
be easier and safer to do a clean install, should such a thing be
possible - which for many (including myself) currently is not.
The test releases of F8 exhibited none of these problems, that I'm
personally aware of, which is why I was so confident that Fedora 8 would
be the best version yet, so I am bitterly disappointed that the final
release is such a mess. As such, I find myself unable to perform a clean
upgrade, and extremely unwilling to take a chance on a dist-upgrade that
may turn out to be futile, especially since subsequent yum "updates" to
the present release will essentially break the system.
The best I can hope for, is that the Fedora Unity team produce a respin
some time in the future that will incorporate subsequent fixes, but
given the current Fedora maintainers' apparent apathy and/or ineptitude,
those fixes may take so long that Fedora 9 will be available before
then, so I may as well wait for the next release.
Meanwhile I will continue to contribute, just as I always have, and
perhaps (like last time) I will find a solution that means I (and
others) can finally install Fedora 8. However, I find myself greatly
disillusioned with the Fedora Project at this point.
On the whole, GNU/Linux continues to be a superior system to Windows,
both in terms of technical merit and philosophy, but retaining that
superior status requires that people actually *do* the work required for
that to happen, and in the case of the Fedora Project they no longer
seem to have the necessary commitment and/or skills. I have no idea what
has happened at Red Hat/Fedora over the past year, but whatever it is, I
don't like it.
I recently talked about spinning my own distro, as a measure intended to
flush out certain undesirable components (Mono, etc.). It seems that
this initiative is becoming more and more necessary by the day. At least
if I release my own distro then I have no one to blame but myself when
things go wrong.
For those who put a lot of time, care and attention into their part of
Fedora 8, I extend my gratitude, and my condolences that their efforts
have been utterly destroyed by those who didn't.
--
K.
http://slated.org
Red Hat/Fedora user, contributor, and past maintainer, since 1998.
Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.9-91.fc7
21:02:53 up 15:16, 2 users, load average: 0.20, 0.24, 0.28
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