First, I'd like to see Fedora become more of an "operating system factory".
There are a few things that seem a bit out of place, in terms of RH's
messaging/endorsing of Fedora, and Fedora's role as an upstream for RHEL
and an engine of moving the entire Linux community forward.
I think this would be great. I think the ability to make it clear how
to make customized fedora images would be very helpful.
In this vein (as other people have commented on this thread), I think it
would be great to give Fedora more visibility. Its absence as a
supported image in Azure, for instance, is particularly noticeable, and
the whole situation with WSL was regrettable. One of the reasons I've
used Ubuntu/Debian in some of those situations is that they're there and
relatively easy to consume. I've come to prefer Fedora because it has
much better leading-edge stuff, and I think that's a huge benefit to the
community that definitely serves a particular segment.
The addition of the virtualbox guest additions to the installer was a
great step, too - the big question, I think is to find ways to make it
easy to consume fedora, and in some cases that means making images for
Virtualbox, for cloud providers, maybe for CI providers too.
Having a few people who talk about Fedora in the ecosystem publicly and
often might be helpful too. There are a bunch of people who are
directly and visibly connected with Ubuntu/Canonical that appear all the
time on the Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts (I know Matt is also
frequently interviewed but that's not quite the same thing). Having
people talking about doing things with Fedora makes it "cool" and
"buzzworthy", and I think that's of value.
Second, we need to figure out how to work with language-native packaging
formats and more directly with code that's distributed in git repos rather
than as tarball releases.
Some languages make this a lot easier than others. The curation that we
do is valuable, and a lot of my interests involve curations of some of
the really neat things I've found in the Python ecosystem. Python makes
it *relatively* easy but it seems there will always be edge cases.
That said, I love Fedora as a platform to explore the latest/greatest in
curated scripting platforms and development.
I'm working on packaging pipx for Fedora, which is a python tool to
install venvs for applications; maybe including some meta-tooling like
this in the distribution might help bridge some of the gaps (that is,
it's infeasible to package all of pypi/CPAN/rubygems), in making it easy
to consume those environments in Fedora, but giving up some of the
advantages of packaging and curation. I understand people might find
that unsuitable on both sides.
I don't know if things like pipx exist for other scripting languages,
but do other people think that's worth exploring? (Currently pipx uses
tox in what seems like a weird way, and we'd need to package userpath
and tox-venv to make them work - I'm working on those and hope to submit
the specs for review soon).
Third, we really need to continue to grow the project as more than coding
and packaging.
Maybe some of this falls into the publicity point that's part of the
first point. I think there's a lot of value to having howto's, project
documentation, guides and so on. I do think it's remarkable that with
the pace that Fedora moves that techniques for approaching certain
problems are still valid and useful. (I built a fault-tolerant firewall
system with Fedora using a conntrackd, iptables, and keepalived with a
guide from...f20 or so? I forget. Still works pretty well.)
One thing I would like to point out, as a sort of editorial comment -
let's not let the areas we can improve in detract from the things Fedora
is great at. We have a small-ish, but relatively vocal Fedora community
where I work, among the sysadmins. I don't think Fedora users are quite
as vocal, but the engineering in Fedora is solid. Sure there are
problems occasionally, but the rate of change and the usability of
Fedora as a daily driver and for some server workloads is pretty impressive.
Thanks,
Marty
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