When the Reg article broke about Moblin moving from Ubuntu as a distro base to Fedora, a few people contacted us at the Fedora booth at OSCON to say, “Go talk with those guys right now!” So we did. Folks seem to be wondering similar questions, hopefully this post answers or points in the right direction.
As it happened, at that moment the Moblin project lead Dirk Hohndel was giving a lighting talk + Q&A at the Intel booth, so Greg DeKoenigsberg, John Poelstra, and I went over to hear more and see what we can offer Dirk and his team.
When Dirk asked for questions, Greg said, handing over his business card, “What can we do for you?” Good laugh from Dirk, and he followed with not really surprising and overall good news. He explained that they are already integrated with Fedora where they need to be, as a downstream, and they know who to talk to for getting their changes pushed back in to Fedora. They interact mainly through the kernel team (read: Dave Jones) and otherwise have no problems with being a downstream and doing things the open source way.
In response to a question about specifically why they switched from Ubuntu, Dirk explained that the Reg article was sensationalizing the announcement, the reality is more mundane. There was not a falling out, just a different technological need that is fulfilled by Fedora.
What is that need? To be based on RPM. This is where the discussion got more interesting to me. The Moblin team’s reason for using an RPM-based distro is to be able to build using openSUSE’s Build Service (OBS). Got that? They are moving from Ubuntu-based to Fedora-based so they can build on OBS. Okay …
Dirk had some specific reasons for using OBS, which I wasn’t able to fully-and-digest. Greg heard a bit better, and said he’d get in touch with Jesse Keating about some of it. If more information is needed, one of us can contact Dirk for more details.
One important feature that I thought that I mentioned was the ability to track the license of a package as part of the spec file. That’s much easier done with RPM than with DEB.
The other big reason was the build system. What we like about OBS is that it allows us distributed builds, automated dependencies with smart partial re-builds, mostly automated boot-strapping, lots of easy configuration options and good integration into the way we want to maintain our sources and how we want to do authentication across hosts.
We looked at Koji but found that on several of these issues it didn’t meet our needs – so we settled on starting from the Fedora packages, but using OBS.
I love open source. Can you imagine doing something like this in the proprietary world?
Exactly, Dirk, it’s fantastic that you can mix and match for your needs. It also helps keep us on our toes about what our tools can and cannot do, etc. Open source + competition is a great combination.
Glad you love open source, Dirk. 🙂
What will your contributions to Fedora (and upstream) mostly look like?
We’ll contribute all of our changes back upstream – and given just how many people we have working on this, I expect this to be quite a bit. Right now we are very busy getting ready to open everything up to the community; give us a couple more weeks or so and you’ll see 🙂