NewsForge: Warren Togami on the New Fedora Project

“The recent merger of the Red Hat Linux Project with the Fedora
Project is an event rife with opportunities for confusion. Although
I wrote an article on the Fedora Project just a few weeks ago, I
was confused by what I read following the merger. I decided to give
Warren Togami (the founder of the Fedora Project and the source for
my original story) a little time for all the furor to die down and
then turn to him for clarification. So for the past few days,
Warren Togami–with some assistance from Red Hat Desktop Manager
Havoc Pennington–and NewsForge have engaged in both IRC and email
conversations to make it all crystal clear.

“Let’s start by looking at what each project was doing prior to
the merger. Togami’s Fedora Project provided a single repository
with well-tested packages for Red Hat. Using apt-get or yum, Red
Hat users could find and then easily install packages not available
directly from Red Hat. Mplayer and Wine were two examples. The
project team was very keen on testing and had a hard time keeping
up with the QA required for submitted packages. Togami was busy
with a part-time job and finishing his senior year studying
Computer Science at the University of Hawaii in addition to running
the project.

“RHLP (the Red Hat Linux Project) was less well defined and
understood. According to Warren, it was ‘a vague concept to move
the RHL free consumer distribution to become a more Debian-like
distribution.’ Beyond the announcement of the project in July,
followed by a retrenchment which saw the shuttering of the RHLP
website, not much ever really happened with the RHLP…”

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