On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 20:15 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
"Not-quite-cooked"? There has to be a "first" and that company gets all the blame for addressing all the problems that people are going to deal with sooner or later.
This is the last time I'm ever going to explain this.
If you want to wallow in ignorance, not stop to understand how software lifecycle works, but feel the need to bash Red Hat like you're an expert, then I just don't know what to tell you other than such marketing non-sense is what I already hate about the Windows world.
Since Red Hat Linux 4.0 (some things weren't quite formalized until about 5.x), Red Hat has pretty much has a 2-2-2, 6-6-6 release model. What is that?
2 Months New Development -- formulating packages, etc... 2 Months Rawhide -- _individual_ package testing + 2 Months Beta -- regression testing _all_ packages as a whole unit =========================== 6 Month Revision Release
6 Revision .0 "Early Adopter" (non-production) 6 Revision .1 "First Production" + 6 Revision .2 "Mature Production" =========================== 18 Month Stable Release
Well before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this is what Red Hat done. They even offered SLAs on Red Hat Linux 6.2 and called it 6.2"E". Now sometimes there have been 4 revisionary releases (e.g., RHL7-RHL7.3).
But this hasn't really changed since, and Red Hat still has 2-2-2 Fedora New-Development-Test (instead of New-Rawhide-Beta). Then after 2-3 Fedora Core releases, Red Hat comes out with its next Enterprise Linux release. No different than before.
Without the 2-2-2 and 6-6-6, you do _not_ get people testing packages, testing packages as a distro, figuring out compatibility issues with any changes, accommodating those changes and eventually making it into the 18 Month "Stable" Release. Someone has to force the adoption of GLibC 2, GCC 3, SELinux, etc..., and that has been Red Hat.
So you can't demonize the development model without realizing how it directly affects the quality of Enterprise Linux. It's also why if Fedora's quality suffers, so will that of RHEL.
But Red Hat cannot dictate the will on the community. Yes, they fund a lot of developers, and solve a lot of problems. E.g., when people were bitching about Qt-KDE, Red Hat helped GNOME. Just recently, the whole Java JRE requirement in OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been blown out of proportion, but Red Hat helped put the people on GCJ to work towards solving it -- instead of just arguing.
Sistina was going to close up LVM/LVM2 and not release it GPL anymore. Red Hat bought them out to make sure it stays GPL. There have been countless other, core Linux packages where Red Hat hasn't just stood around and argued, but actually done something _for_ the community. It listens very, very, _very_ well, typically because Red Hat is really just the largest collection of GPL developers and projects itself!
To conclude, if you want something to bitch about, it's not hard to find it. But it's much harder to stop, think and appreciate what people do to make RHEL and CentOS great, enterprise-quality distros. Don't feel you need to demonize Red Hat because you like CentOS. It's not only very inconsiderate of what Red Hat does for the community, but you're only exposing your ignorance in how the quality behind RHEL/CentOS comes into being.
Just as it always has -- by the 2-2-2 and 6-6-6 model.