Seneca breaks silence on Fedora Remix

Chris Tyler posted an update today.

Estimated release date is 20th, but lots of work to do.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-July/003631.html

New estimated release date for Fedora Remix from Chris Tyler:

"aim to ship next week", with 3.2.27 kernel.

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2012-09-26/fedora-meeting-1.2012-09-26-20.00.log.html

Also, the RPF is reportedly working with Fedora on firmware licensing:

>> I heard that there won't be an official Fedora build of the Raspberry Pi remix because

>> the firmware license is not compatible with the Fedora firmware guidelines.

>

> Correct at this point in time. I meant an official remix stable release.

> Fedora legal and the board are working with the foundation to try and resolve the firmware issue

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-September/004085.html

or will those who "invest" in Fedora find themselves high and dry at some point in the future?

Not sure how much you know about Fedora, essentially it's the alpha-test space for things that may (or may not) end up in the commercial RHEL some years in the future. As such, it's quite easy to find yourself high and dry quite quickly with Fedora since they really don't do any sort of support beyond the horizon of the next release.

OTOH, Seneca is not equal to Fedora. I'm not really sure what the exact relationship is there, or between them and the RPF, but unless Seneca are prepared to put the continued effort into their port I don't see how it can be viable. The official fedora folks have indicated they're not really interested.

Yeah I agree that they completely botched the release then subsequent comunications(or the lack of).

I even sent an email to one of the boss men there and offered help....nothing ...nada

Any way it will be interesting to see what if anything of use they will actually produce, they have certainly lost traction and with several Disros specifically for the ' Pi now available then "WHY ??? " is perfectly valid question, why would you want to use a distro which is maintained by folk who are totally incomunicative... pitty really!

BTW if they have Sold or have orders for .5 million units are they still a minority platform on a minority Arch ?

RPF clearly wanted Ubuntu as the preferred OS, but that didn't work out. 

IMHO, that shows a clear disconnect from reality. Ubuntu have a track record of only doing what interests themselves. It was never going to work out unless Mark Shuttleworth decided he wanted to be involved.

Similarly, Fedora considers ARM a secondary architecture, and considers the RPi Remix to be

a second-class member of the ARM family.  They realize that the RPi would require a lot of work

to do X11 acceleration, and to do a hard-float version,

Raspbian is in much the same situation, but it came together quite quickly based on a single individuals interest in making it happen.

and to integrate the RPi kernel changes

into the current kernel, especially with device tree support and the troublesome USB driver. 

The kernel changes necessary are beginning to be pushed into mainline, that effort may take some time though and there's an ongoing effort to redo the usb driver in mainline - not due to the RPi but due to lots of other devices using the same synopsis device.

It all suffers from the same problem though, it takes sustained community involvement to kickstart some of these efforts. None of the RPF, Fedora, Ubuntu etc seem interested in funding things like the accelerated X driver, so these things may simply never happen.

Yeah I use Fedora all the while, you are effectively on a rolling beta program, it's really for developers or those who want to try new technologies and are willing to "work things out" if required.  Fedora it's self is going stong, Senica it's self seems to be a bit of an ebarrassment it's sad to say. I don't see it all been very effective in the long term with out dramatic upturn in effort. Other distros are moving a head rapidly.

> BTW if they have Sold or have orders for .5 million units are they still a minority platform on a minority Arch ?

Don't confuse "secondary" with "minority".

A primary architecture means, among other things, having strict release criteria.

A serious regression that affects a primary architecture will delay a release, but

the same problem affecting only a secondary architecture will not.  A secondary

architecture may not get released at the same time as the primary architectures.

The x86 fedora builds are unified with a single kernel image, not so currently for

ARM, although that's the goal.

Fedora 17 was released on 29 May 2012 for primary architecures.

Fedora 17 for ARM was released on 18 June 2012 for the officially supported ARM

machines, not including the RPi Remix, which is not officially part of Fedora.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora_17_GA

"Raspberry Pi support is not included in Fedora 17 GA because it does not meet the

Fedora release guidelines. Specifically, the Raspberry Pi relies upon a custom kernel

version, not upstream, as well as special GPU binary blobs which are not acceptable

under the current firmware exception."

latest Seneca status (including list of non-excuses) is here:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-October/004230.html

the release early, release often philosophy has been well proven over the years, he really should make the effort. Doing it in an open way could even get them some needed help. Keeping to radio silence behind closed doors isn't going to win them much support.

I know from personal experience that an extra pair of eyes might make all the difference to finding that bug and getting the thing released..

Fedora Remix 17 for RPi has finally been released (soft-float only).

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-November/004366.html

Fedora Remix 18 for RPi has been released (soft-float only).

    http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2013-March/005514.html

This is based on the ARMv5 architecture.  The Fedora project has end-of-lifed

the ARMv5 architecture at Fedora 18 although the Seneca group may perhaps

maintain it further for the RPi, or perhaps switch to ARMv6.

Chris Tyler says today:

"There's something good coming down the pipe ... watch for an announcement on May 14."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=42010&start=3

Trying to guess what the good announcement might be, I don't think it will be an

announcement of the long-awaited firmware update to fix the Hynix memory problem,

since that could be fixed at any time by simply copying over the latest version of 2 files.

It might be the long-awaited hard-float version, but there has been no recently reported

progress on that in the fedora arm weekly meetings or mailing list.

It might be RPi educational materials, based on the meeting room reservation for May 9.

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Meeting_Room_T1042

It might be an announcement of plans for Fedora 19.  The Alpha version of F19 was

released a few days ago for primary architectures, but not ARM, and RPi generally

lags behind the other Fedora ARM releases.

Chris Tyler says today:

"There's something good coming down the pipe ... watch for an announcement on May 14."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=42010&start=3

Trying to guess what the good announcement might be, I don't think it will be an

announcement of the long-awaited firmware update to fix the Hynix memory problem,

since that could be fixed at any time by simply copying over the latest version of 2 files.

It might be the long-awaited hard-float version, but there has been no recently reported

progress on that in the fedora arm weekly meetings or mailing list.

It might be RPi educational materials, based on the meeting room reservation for May 9.

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Meeting_Room_T1042

It might be an announcement of plans for Fedora 19.  The Alpha version of F19 was

released a few days ago for primary architectures, but not ARM, and RPi generally

lags behind the other Fedora ARM releases.

coder27 wrote:

 

Chris Tyler says today:

 

"There's something good coming down the pipe ... watch for an announcement on May 14."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=42010&start=3

 

Trying to guess what the good announcement might be, I don't think it will be an

announcement of the long-awaited firmware update to fix the Hynix memory problem,

since that could be fixed at any time by simply copying over the latest version of 2 files.

 

It might be the long-awaited hard-float version, but there has been no recently reported

progress on that in the fedora arm weekly meetings or mailing list.

 

It might be RPi educational materials, based on the meeting room reservation for May 9.

http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Meeting_Room_T1042

 

It might be an announcement of plans for Fedora 19.  The Alpha version of F19 was

released a few days ago for primary architectures, but not ARM, and RPi generally

lags behind the other Fedora ARM releases.

It's beginning to look like a wind up.

there was an announcement on the 14th - the long awaited camera was released and went on sale.

whether that's what he was hinting at, or not I couldn't say.... but I don't think I'd bother releasing anything on the same day as the camera.

I'm sure that was in fact the "Big Anouncement"  personally I can't see what the camera module has to do with a Fedora Release, unless they planned a release n the same day which supported it?

I managed to get an order in for one of those cameras after a load of hassle the only similarity between them both is that they are both like Unicorn Manure(TM)

the camera board is supposedly still in stock for now, I put my order in earlier today.. I've been watching the '840 in stock' number diminish rapidly ever since.

Currently can't decide if they'll last the day or not..

Yeah I was initially directed to the Farnell site and that went buy 9.30am yesterday !!

Also they have implemented strict one per customer limitations.

I hope to get mine soon as I ordered it yesterday and normally CPC do next day

I live in hope ......or at least where a few Unicorns run about

John Alexander wrote:

 

Yeah I was initially directed to the Farnell site and that went buy 9.30am yesterday !!

Also they have implemented strict one per customer limitations.

I hope to get mine soon as I ordered it yesterday and normally CPC do next day

Interesting that CPC have done a one-per-customer thing again (and out of stock already), there's absolutely no indication of anything like that on the farnell site

My bet is that the May 14 camera announcement was pure coincidence,

and that Chris Tyler's non-announcement was due to yet another delay

of the hard-float Fedora 18 Remix release.

There are lots of software release lessons to be learned from the Seneca folks,

and it is ironic that their group is based on a class on that topic.  One of the

obvious lessons is not to discontinue maintenance on your current release

while you are working on the next release, because the next release might

not come as soon as you expect.

... or perhaps the "ctyler" who made the mysterious pre-announcement on the Pi forum isn't that C Tyler at all. User "ctyler" isn't exactly prolific, so it's rather hard to judge authenticity by other posts:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=39637

joined Pi forum: 22nd Oct 2012

last visited: 30th April 2013

total posts: 1

There are indeed many lessons to be gleaned here. Perhaps one of the most crucial is that as the Fedora Project don't officially support the Pi then it's always going to be an uphill struggle. Another is that after reading endless meeting transcripts, mailing list faddle and the like, it's pretty clear to me that Seneca are very good at making plans, but not so good at actually getting stuff done, or communicating with users of their product.

I wouldn't hire them to organise a kiddies' party. They'd probably spend a year having meetings trying to decide on the optimum inflation pressure for the bouncy castle. Then they'd forget to hire the magician and the party food would doubtless be made from tofu, brussel sprouts and granary floorsweepings.

If Fedora had any sense they'd slap a "cease and desist" on them.

There is news coming today.

The agenda for the Fedora Arm meeting that starts at 4pm EDT says:

        5) Pidora Status Update

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2013-May/005992.html

Pidora is what they are calling the planned hard-float F18 RPi Remix.

The meeting log at:

    http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-05-15/fedora-meeting-1.2013-05-15-20.18.log.txt

20:54:28 #topic 5) Pidora Status Update

20:55:10 Do we have a Pidora 18 final image.

20:55:11 But!

20:55:30 The foundation updated the firmware on Monday, and we have some breakage.

20:56:02 Should have that fixed in the next few hours. Once we have final image, we'll schedule the release announcement.

20:56:10 firstboot doesn't run

20:56:39 Looks like an issue accessing the vfat /boot partition.

20:56:50 We would have shipped with the previous firmware rev, but the new firmware

20:57:04 enables Pidora to be included on a new multi-distro card image

20:57:16 that will be bundled with the HW for a few dollars.

20:57:27 And we really want to be there.

20:58:41 ctyler, great, any features we can look for, cool things? or should we wait for the announcement?

20:59:16 Reasonable performance of the GUI, full toolchain on the card, nice firstboot,

20:59:32 headless mode, many other fun things.