It seems that Moblin will be switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux as their base operating system. I’m interested in finding out the underlying reasoning for such a move. The stated reason is because they wanted to use RPM instead of DEB. I can’t quite buy that but perhaps that is because having come from both camps I think that packaging is an implementation detail that too many people put way too much stock in. This has the effect of causing unnecessary emotional splits within the community resulting in animosity which often overshadows real threats.
The second reason given, which has to do with building a community is pretty broad but more believable. Fedora has made huge strides while also sticking to its guns in the freedom department and being valuable upstream contributors. It may be that we sacrificed short term gains which can be gotten via a bit more differentiation, or out of the box “just works” on closed hardware but as companies are being convinced to open up their specs and open drivers are being written, a large portion of which is being done by Fedora developers working upstream, little of the short term gains matter much.
I suspect the real reason is somewhere in the community vein, staring with the Kernel and X team developers who work tirelessly making sure their work is fit for upstream consumption and can be supported in the long term. Following their lead the rest falls naturally out of that single notion of moving Linux forward as a whole. Kudo’s to all my Fedora friends – keep moving forward.
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No, nothing quite so interesting.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/2008-July/msg00198.html
Comment by ignacio — July 24, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
Ouch. From the article, this seems pretty misguided: switching to RPM is not going to provide “community push” and the usefulness of a SuSE tie-in is questionable. It sounds like Dirk Hohndel just likes RPM. Well, good luck with that…
Comment by a — July 24, 2008 @ 5:25 pm
The sole purpuse of switching to rpm is to be able to put information about the packages license INTO the package. No big deal. Anyways – moblin? Who cares…
Comment by Manny — July 25, 2008 @ 2:09 am
From an outsiders perspective Redhat seems to contribute more than Ubuntu in coding for Intel hardware (graphics etc) so perhaps in terms of “developer community” Fedora is a better fit.
Ubuntu has a great community but it seems focused mostly on end-user polish rather than core development.
Comment by Paul — July 25, 2008 @ 2:28 am
Try using deb in any real scale… It really sucks! RPM is a far better packaging system easier to manage etc… (one file is better than a dozen)
I’ve heard that conary is even better than RPM, and that IPS is pretty good too. For me RPM has always been easier to manage, more robust and generally more sane than deb.
Comment by Karl Lattimer — July 25, 2008 @ 3:17 am
“From an outsiders perspective Redhat seems to contribute”
Not only does it seem to, it actually does
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions for some details.
Comment by Rahul Sundaram — July 25, 2008 @ 5:16 am
[...] us at the Fedora booth at OSCON to say, “Go talk with those guys right now!” So we did. Folks seem to be wondering similar questions, hopefully this post answers or points in the right [...]
Pingback by i, quaid › A word about Intel’s Moblin and Fedora — July 25, 2008 @ 5:04 pm
@Manny: As in anything there are always more complex reasons for a decision than one can simply boil down to one catalyst. Yours seems especially specious. Though that may have been a technical bullet point I have never seen someone totally ditch one foundation for another based on something so trivial. It would be business suicide as such a switch is pretty costly. If Moblin did its homework, which I have to believe they did, then they believe that the switch will have benefits down the line which will justify the initial cost.
Comment by J5 — July 25, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
Sorry but RPM is technically superior to deb. In fact, the reason multilib is so easy in Fedora is precisely because of this technical superiority of RPM. And RPM is more robust.
Take it from me, I’ve been using Ubuntu for more than one year and I switched back to Fedora 64 bit last week.
Comment by Rudd-O — July 27, 2008 @ 12:11 am