Stable release updates vision

[Kevin Kofler]

On Thursday 11 March 2010, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> As noted in our previous minutes[1], the Board was tasked with
> producing a vision statement for updates to Fedora stable releases.
> That vision can be found here:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision
> 
> This statement is the result of many Board discussions which have
> taken into consideration issues raised recently in numerous other
> venues such as the devel list.  After considering these issues
> carefully, along with other factors such as the broad user base for
> which we should strive[2], the Board feels this vision will best meet
> the needs of our millions of users, including our contributor base.
> 
> The Board would like FESCo to read through this vision statement, and
> use it as a basis for implementing changes that will help achieve this
> vision.  We look forward to working with FESCo and across the whole
> Fedora Project to continue improving the Fedora distribution.

So we're now getting a diktat from the half-unelected Board which appears to 
completely ignore the desires of the majority of our users[1], instead 
repeating already disproven arguments such as the following?

* "End-user satisfaction with our distribution will increase" – wrong, the 
vast majority of our users will be unhappy with this change, see [1].
* "developers will have more time to focus on other areas in Fedora" – it's 
actually MORE work to maintain separate specfiles per release with backported 
security/bug fixes than to just sync the specfile from devel and build it for 
all releases.
* "A six month development cycle for a release allows Fedora to integrate the 
latest and greatest releases from upstream projects into the 'rawhide' 
distribution and have that body of work available to the user base in a 
relatively short amount of time." – 6 months are actually a very long time. 
For example, I and many other users don't want to have to wait 3 months to get 
the current KDE (and yet that's the time between the KDE 4.4.0 release on Feb 
9 and the scheduled F13 release on May 11).
* "More skilled and/or intrepid users are encouraged to use  Rawhide along 
with participating in testing of stable branches during the development and 
pre-release period." – It has been explained many times on the devel mailing 
list why this is not a viable alternative. (Rawhide also does other kind of 
changes which are not acceptable for a production machine, e.g. if I'm running 
KDE 3, I don't want to wake up tomorrow with KDE 3.96.2 (that was a heavily 
unstable prerelease of KDE 4.0.0 which we put into Rawhide so work on 
packaging 4.0.x can start, it would have been impossible to ship F9 with KDE 4 
without that use of Rawhide), nor even with a "known good" KDE 4 such as 
4.3.5. Such transitions are what we have releases for!).
* "Stable releases should provide a consistent user experience throughout the 
lifecycle, and only fix bugs and security issues." – Do you really seriously 
suggest we should have kept F9 on KDE 4.0.x rather than upgrading it to KDE 
4.1.x and later 4.2.x? Those were not bugfix-only releases, but they sure fixed 
MANY bugs, in addition to readding features known from KDE 3 which many users 
were missing. It is Fedora's very nature to often ship emerging technologies 
which take some time to mature, feature upgrades are often essential in those 
cases.

[1] http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1337744

(If this doesn't make it through to f-a-b, please feel free to forward it. I'm 
all for transparency!)

        Kevin Kofler