On Mon, December 7, 2015 13:41, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 09:03:50AM -0500, James B. Byrne wrote: >> On Thu, Dec 03, 2015 at 02:50:38PM -0500, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: >> > For laptops, great. For anything else, not so much. For example, >> > it's supposed to be an *ENTERPRISE* o/s... why does it >> > automatically, without ever asking, install anything wifi? I'm > [...] >> The short answer: Because RHEL is based on Fedora development. > > > This is roughly true, although "downstream" RHEL makes its own > decisions about many things. If you (Mark, or anyone else) would like > to make this different in the future, getting involved with Fedora > Server is a good way to do so. > I subscribe to the Fedora Server list digest. Which form also is how I get this list's messages. Thus the delay in my responses. However, to describe the Server List as an active forum for discussion would be somewhat overstating things. I have not received anything from it as yet in December and the total volume of traffic on that list in November was very light. I am not sure in what way you envisage additional involvement is to take place. I have been bitten by things done in Fedora that only have any use on a laptop and that should never have been allowed into a server distribution. But I cannot see how I would have been aware of them until they manifested themselves on equipment under my care. By which time it is rather too late to influence the decision to include them. Automatically powering down NICs comes to my mind; due the rather nasty consequences that resulted. The difficulty is that with Free and Open Source Software you are only going to see features that are of some immediate use to the writers; or whose value has already been entrenched such that it is difficult if not impossible to dispense with. Clearly, power saving features are of some interest to people that run their systems on batteries. However, there are batteries, and then there are batteries. We occasionally run run on batteries too. It is just that ours are measured in kilovolt-amp hours. Having a server distro configured by default to turn off a NIC because it has not had traffic for fifteen minutes is not going to save us enough power from now to the end of eternity to warrant the disruption that little 'feature' cost us when it was first encountered. The move to Systemd, and all the controversy that decision has generated, also provides 'features' whose benefits appear to me be be aimed principally at users who shut their systems off every day. These benefits are of far less value to people who measure uptime in months or years, while the discomfort, and expense, of this change must be borne regardless. Systemd will eventually be accepted or rejected on its own merits. I am not interested in debating them here since I have nothing upon which to base an opinion one way or the other. But it can hardly be denied that forcing highly qualified people to expend time, a very limited resource in my experience, to learn yet another way to start a computer system, without providing any readily discernible benefit to them, is not likely to engender much in the way of sympathy. We went to RedHat and ended up on CentOS because of its server orientation. Which to us implied something more than simple compatibility of the software components. If RedHats's intent is to end up as a laptop distro then we will probably part ways at some point. We have a laptop distro that works well for us. It is called OSX. And the hardware is pretty good too. -- *** e-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** Do NOT transmit sensitive data via e-Mail James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3