14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds posted a very simple and direct message on Google+ addressed to the Fedora people. What followed next involved accusations and various veiled insults.
The father of Linux had a very simple question: how come the Fedora developers were not regenerating the distribution images with newer kernels and packages?
“Is there some basic reason why you never regenerate the install images? Right now the F19 install images use some ancient 3.9-based kernel. Which means that they may boot on most machines, but it's missing wireless ID's for new laptops etc, so making it useful is unnecessarily painful,” said Linus Torvalds.
The problem is that, if you have a new laptop and an old kernel, you might not get full functionality from it, especially if the wireless module is unrecognized by the kernel.
The solution would be a newer kernel but, in order to get it, you have to have access to the Internet, which is impossible because the kernel is not recognizing the hardware. It's a vicious circle easy to break if you know how to compile your own kernel and if your name is Linus Torvalds.
Shortly after the post, a few Red Hat developers have tried to explain that they can't afford to put people on testing and they can't release an image that might not work.
“Because right now you say ‘we don't have Q&A to verify the images,’ and I'm telling you that's [expletive], because the old image is known to be broken, so claiming that the new images might be broken is all kinds of stupid, isn't it?” said Torvals. He didn't stop there.
“So all your arguments are just [expletive] stupid. Call it F19.x, warn people that it's ‘more up-to-date,’ and just stop making stupid excuses for having an image THAT DOES NOT WORK, because you want to not test whether the new image MIGHT NOT WORK,” also said Torvalds.
A few more arguments have been posted on either sides, but it's likely that we could see regenerated Fedora images in the future. Check the Google+ post of Linus Torvalds to see the whole conversation.