Well, the FNU#4 went out without too much issues (except one spelling error; sorry Jack) and was the first time I used information from IRC (the one Sopwith posted about FC2 test1 delays). A more concrete status report is online.
Abiword being removed from the build system was huge news. Well tough, Jeremy will include it later, but he has other priorities. Keeping to the Core release, we really should not be having more than one package that gets the job done – thats why we have Extras (and fedora.us is extras).
The problem Linux newbies face is that there’s just way too much choice. Want a HTML editor? Searching on freshmeat will give you at least 20 choices. How does a newbie know if to use Abiword or OpenOffice.org? Bluefish or Mozilla Composer? Mplayer or Totem? They get confused. Thats what Fedora Core aims to remove – the confusion.
That’s where the Extras come into place. Because we know that choice needs to be kept alive. The choice to choose your favourite utility, that’s the beauty of this open source world. Plus, if the Core was trimmed further, we’d have ISOs that are lesser in size. And if you ever wanted something else, you know there’s a wide repository of Extras available.
It’s like the choice to use pine as a mail reader. It’s not included, but there’s an “extras” repository that has it (Dag’s apt repository, for instance). The best utility for the job folks; thats what Core’s about, IMHO.
On other notes, why doesn’t Abiword deal with OpenOffice.org OASIS XML files yet? (besides the plugin?) KOffice has decided that an open standard is the way to go.