Is Fedora an upstream testing platform for RHEL?

rjo0

I thought RHEL is upstream of Fedora, how can Fedora be an upstream testing platform then? Its also inconsistent with the visualization of the other distributions and families, as SLES is supposed to be upstream for openSUSE, which also makes more sense with the visualization.

fcioanca

Hi @rjo0

This has been updated in the course. Thank you for flagging.

Regards,
Flavia

KevinCSmallwood

Fedora is upstream from RHEL. OpenSuse is upstream from SLES. When we talk about being upstream, we are referring to software features and development. Red Hat uses Fedora to try new features before they get put into a future release of RHEL. The same applies to OpenSUSE and SLES. Certain features in a Fedora release may or may not be found in a future RHEL release. Fedora is considered a "bleeding edge" release for RHEL. Unless you know what you are doing, we don't recommend people new to Linux run Fedora. Sometimes Fedore may be unstable--an environment you probably should not be learning Linux with. OpenSuse is not typically as experimental as Fedora is, but new features will find their way into OpenSuse that may or may not find their way into SLES. Note that these new features may also come and go from these upstream releases. This is what we mean by "upstream."

The diagram at the beginning of your note is showing how various Linux distributions (Distros) are related. Fedora and CentOS, for example, are Red Hat distributions; software packages are of the "rpm" format. Ubuntu and Mint are Debian distributions. Sorry that this was confusing but thank you for asking about this so we could clarify.

rjo0

Thank you for your answer, as this clears things up. I did understand it the way you described initially. But i got confused with the word upstream in the questionaire, because the course states (in the 3rd picture i attached) that SLES is upstream for openSUSE. And that made me confused about which way is up in the diagram.
What you say makes more sense, but means there is an error in the course material that leads to confusion. Maybe someone from the LF can fix that for future course takers.

KevinCSmallwood

You are correct in questioning this. I made a mistake in my answer; it is not quite complete. There are technically two versions of OpenSUSE: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and OpenSUSE LEAP. SLES is upstream to OpenSUSE LEAP and not the other way around. OpenSUSE LEAP is based on the current version of SLES. So, SLES is upstream to OpenSUSE LEAP. However, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed incorporates "rolling" (like a tumbleweed) releases. It gets updated frequently with new things from the community. Some of those things will get put into future releases of SLES (and some won't). OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is upstream to SLES. OpenSUSE LEAP is what most people call OpenSUSE (and it was the only version of OpenSUSE a few years ago). So, the course material is correct that SLES is upstream to what most people in the SUSE community think of as OpenSUSE, that is OpenSUSE LEAP.

I'm sorry for my mistake but thank you for pointing this out. I think I should probably update this in the material. I was trying to keep it simple, but I don't think I can.