Open Source Weblog

You can read the news story that resulted from the conversation over here, but I wanted to highlight some of the key stats that help to explain why the decision has been taken to create a new CVS even though it means an increase in work for Red Hat’s Fedora engineers.

“Now the community can contribute to 100% of Fedora instead of 70%,” said Spevack, noting that previously only Red Hat employees could work on Fedora Core packages.

While those Red Hat employees now have two CVS systems to develop to, it makes sense given the split between Red Hat developers and non-Red Hat developers.

According to Spevack there are around 1,200 developers who have signed a Fedora contributor license agreement, while only 2-300 Red Hat engineers contribute to the project.

The move to base Fedora on the former Extras CVS also makes sense when you look at the number of software packages from each of the former projects. According to Spevack, Fedora 6 has 2,200 Core packages and around 5,000 Extras packages.

Spevack also spoke a little about his plans form Fedora going forward. While he plans to take a couple of days off after the release of 7, the Fedora board is already thinking about 8 and 9.

For 8 the board is considering a shorter release cycle with plans to get it out at the end of October so as to avoid any delays running into the Christmas slowdown. 9 will likely return to a six-months release cycle with GA at the end of April or beginning of May, and will probably include some early RHEL 6 technologies, as well as ongoing laptop and multimedia improvements.

Spevack also spoke a little about how the Fedora plans are managed with reference to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux roadmap. While the RHEL plans are clearly at the back of his mind, Fedora is now more independent than ever, and Spevack said he was not aware, for example, of when Fedora 7 features might be added to RHEL.

When the Fedora board sits down to plans Fedora 8, there will be some planned RHEL functionality that its Red Hat representatives will bring to the table if the schedules match up, he says. Other than that, as Red Hat features are ready, they can always be tossed in to the Rawhide nightly build, he added.