[Ilugc] How far we are going to Compromise ?
- From: sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rahul)
- Date: Mon Aug 21 13:46:40 2006
Toufeeq Hussain wrote:
Agreed that it's not related to funding. The point I'm trying to raise
is that of "importance". Fedora hasn't yet received the update to
Firefox, whereas RHEL has.
Actually Firefox and Thunderbird received the updates on the same day
the "rant" was posted and the updates were being prepared even before
the mailing list discussion started.
The problem is that there is just *one* guy
who is taking care of mozilla related packages (that includes Firefox
and TB) for all distro-variants from redHat(including FC). Fedora has
a huge community(probably the largest) , why can't the maintainership
of the firefox/thunderbird packages be given to the community members
if RH feels it's being under-staffed and their developers overworked.
Thats a pretty fair question but it requires you to understand more of
the details. So here we go.
There are number of related issues.
Fedora Core is Red Hat maintained and has 2000 plus packages which is
provided in the media (CD/DVD).
Fedora Extras has 3000 plus packages the larger community has access
towards and maintain. It is not available in media and has a rolling
updates model.
Fedora Core shares the build system with RHEL right from the Red Hat
Linux days and the buildsystem happens to be pretty much tied to the
rest of the Red Hat development infrastructure.
When Fedora Extras needed a buildsystem, Dan William from Red Hat (who
originally wrote and maintains Network Manager) wrote up a mock based
buildsystem.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Plague
Fedora Core recently moved into a mock based build system too called
"brew" and since it is available on media a release has to be made and
brew does more than just build packages. It also takes care of many of
the details around release management and unless the community has
access to these details, patching and building a new package in Fedora
Core needs to be done within Red Hat. Firefox and Thunderbird are
particularly tricky packages since upstream doesnt work with vendor
security on many occasions and patches needs to be hand picked and
rolled out.
Moving Firefox to Fedora Extras is not a option since it is the default
browser for Fedora and needs to be in Fedora Core for now.
The problem is that RH doesn't want to give up control of Fedora.
Not really. The real issue in this instance is how to get community to
do maintenance within Fedora Core? If you read the thread you cited
further, this was discussed there.
Moving more of the packages into Fedora Extras gets them community
access and this is being over the last few releases. Moving them is not
easy since end users using a previous release need a upgrade path.
Fedora Extras was not available during installation time for previous
releases. Fedora Core 5 Anaconda switched to using Yum internally. In
Fedora Core 6, Anaconda will have the ability to access any Yum software
repository during installation including Fedora Extras so now users have
a more easy upgrade path even when packages move from Fedora Core into
Fedora Extras and vice versa.
KDE for example is one of the packages planned to be moved into Fedora
Extras for better community access
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UnleashKDE
More work is being done on getting the community to access the build
system and release management infrastructure so external maintainers can
work in Fedora Core. A related thing is moving into a distributed
source code management into of CVS and the details are available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Schedule
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/VersionControl
Hang on. We will get there within a release or two.
Rahul
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