On Thu, Nov 14, 2019 at 12:23 PM John M. Harris Jr <johnmh(a)splentity.com> wrote:
> Believe me, I wish that the ideal distribution was possible too. The
> reality is that the world has gone in a different direction and Fedora
> needs to adapt to that. Holding the line and refusing to budge just
> means people will go around us and stop considering us relevant.
This is simply not true. Debian is another clear example of this.
Unfortunately, Debian is pretty much the reason why things have swung
away from distributions. They operate in an extreme with a somewhat
hostile contribution model with aging, yet horrible tooling and a
culture for inaction. Their policies, tooling, and culture are
essentially antithetical to what people generally want. If you look at
a large swath of things using Debian as a base, they often *ignore*
what Debian provides and put their own stuff on top. There's almost no
real reuse from Debian, and that's the great tragedy.
Fedora has some advantages over Debian: our policies and culture is
generally favorable to those with a bias for action. Our tooling is
nowhere near as crufty as Debian's (though it's still not as nice as
openSUSE's in some cases). And our community is pretty well-engaged
compared to most, and we're not generally seeing a downward trend in
contributors (based on what Matthew said at Flock). And most
obviously, our software is much more up to date on a regular basis
than most other distributions.
That said, we *do* need to improve things and find new ways to make
Fedora appealing to more people, especially newer-generation infra
types and software developers. Otherwise, we'll lose the pipeline of
fresh blood into the project and eventually stagnate like Debian has.
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!