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Posted by b at Sun Sep 23 18:21:51 2007
This sort of centralization is totaly stupid, sorry!

Posted by Adam Williamson at Sun Sep 23 18:27:23 2007
Speaking for Mandriva, that would involve losing entirely too much hardware compatibility to be practical.

Posted by Peteris Krisjanis at Sun Sep 23 20:14:59 2007
This is not bad - and is not stupid, if it's done right. However, forbid ANY kernel add-on packages won't be right.

Posted by JS at Sun Sep 23 21:00:28 2007
Yeah, great move and users of affected hardware can go screw themselves. I can understand not distributing closed drivers but closing doors even on open ones just because they are not in upstream kernel? Why fedora guys won't drop all their kernel patches first?

Posted by Reply at Sun Sep 23 23:07:57 2007
You guys are overreacting.

Fedora's focus is developing open source software. Other distribution that are more user oriented will package as many kernel modules as their licensing policies allow; Fedora, OTOH, cares more about doing the "right thing" from a technical pov.

Posted by V at Mon Sep 24 09:37:36 2007
Bah, I don't get this idea at all. Luckily I don't use Fedora

Posted by emmanuel at Mon Sep 24 10:46:38 2007
the question is, who is that good for?

drivers not in the kernel tree are annoying for kernel developers. and are a pain for distributors. it's better that drivers are in-tree, agreed.
and this decision is about pressuring authors of those drivers to put the drivers in-tree.

but it's NOT good for users, short- and medium-term. there are critical drivers which are not in-tree and which are open source/free software, like gspca (driver for tons of webcams):
http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html

negative energy (dogma "we will not include those drivers") will just move users to other distributions (namely ubuntu). this energy would much better be spent by talking to authors of those drivers and asking why they don't want the driver to be in-tree and how we can help them with that.

Posted by D at Mon Sep 24 13:02:01 2007
It's a terrible move. A decision made on short-sighted and naive general arguments that simply forget to take into account the complexity of real-life situations.

Fedora is becoming more and more upstream biased, with little to no respect for end-users, and this is hurting the distribution in the long term, as the linux desktop surveys confirm.

Posted by jef at Mon Sep 24 14:51:56 2007
"this energy would much better be spent by talking to authors of those drivers and asking why they don't want the driver to be in-tree and how we can help them with that."

Sure. The developer of these drivers is not interesed in that. NOTE that Fedora is saying that if you are introducing modules, just patch the main kernel package instead of maintaining separate module packages. They aren't rejecting all patches altogether. However the long term goal is going to be to not change much from upstream.

Posted by lixfe at Mon Sep 24 19:42:18 2007
That kind of move is a double edged sword. If kernel policies remain strict on driver design, much time will pass before driver is upstream (Linux however promised a change). In the meantime distro users won't have their stuff working out-of-box but instead will be compiling or installing third-party packages from 3rd party repos (similar e.g. to mp3 support stuff).

For some driver authors it's simply not feasible to rewrite half of it just to push upstream: some need really lots of work as they were targeted at some older framework and risk loosing compatibility with older kernels. Then there are various "status quo" ones like lirc, I'm not sure why it's out-of-tree (probably authors don't want to integrate it with input layer). In some cases authors might give up, so the attitude is in fact counter productive in that case.

I still support RH testing their own out of tree stuff here, if it is submitted to upstream in that form.This is completely different from shipping a out-of-tree driver which needs a rewrite anyway.