Impossible Objectives For Fedora Core 7

2007-01-05 13:21:37

A message by Bill Nottingham on fedora-devel-list lists readjusts the FC7 General Availability from April 24 to April 26, and summarizes from the Features page «28 features that we’d like to include in the release»:

Modify the build system to support this new paradigm

Merge Core and Extras in source control

Use the new pungi tool to spin all releases

A Fedora Desktop spin

A Fedora Server spin

A Fedora KDE spin

Make LiveCDs as a part of the distribution release process

Ability to customize non-packaging distrubution parameters

Switch to libata drivers for PATA support

Speedup of bootup and shutdown

Make wireless rock-solid

Add wireless firmware for all the chipsets we can

CodecBuddy

Fixing the proliferation of dictionary packages

Support encrypted filesystems

Fast user switching in the desktop

Fix the firewire stack

Switch to a tickless kernel by default

Fix unnecessary wakeups across the distribution

Add KVM virtualization support to our tools

Investigate (but probably don’t switch to) new init technologies

Add the nouveau drivers for nVidia cards

Speed up Yum and RPM

Add support for RandR 1.2

Switch to syslog-ng

Make the update system useable by all

Quite ambitious, eh?

I personally find the proposed objectives too ambitious, and most likely impossible to achieve in the remaining time span!

From the messages that followed...

Robert Scheck opines that «For Fedora 7 we absolutely should fix the bugs #132925, #152435, #192854, #220265, #193475, #206697, #212780 as they’re longer open but unfortunately silent moved from one Fedora release to another and most of them are tagged EasyFix, too.»

Yep. Instead of polishing the fixable bugs, "they" target "major objectives", duh...

It seems impossible to "Speed up Yum and RPM" till April ("the new magic RPM").

Chris Adams believes he can solve a mystery: no more "Fedora Core 7" and ".fc7". «The next release could be called "Fedora Linux 7" and use "fl7" for short.»

Matej Cepl is skeptical too: «I am afraid 49 unclosed EasyFixes is still 49 too many.»

The LiveCDs will be installable. (It’s here.)

"Fedora Desktop" means "Fedora Gnome desktop".

An interesting thing is that it might exist an 8GB DVD image with everything in it... «But probably the official Fedora mirrors don’t want to carry it.» It’s entirely possible such a thing would be Bittorrent-only. 8 GB via torrents?! Jesse Keating doubts that there would be people interested in downloading 8 GB.

Nevertheless, we need a everything DVD "Fedora 7 Complete", especially since Chris Adams notes that «lots of users (and potential users) don’t have high speed or even reliable Internet access; they need everything they install to be on physical media.»

I’ll end my selection of opinions with some suggestions for the wireless and firewall rules.