FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Doug Ledford]

On 03/01/2010 05:01 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 16:51 -0500, Doug Ledford wrote:
>> To be pedantic, Fedora is what it is.  What the leadership has to say
>> doesn't really matter in terms of what Fedora *is*, only in terms of
>> what Fedora is *supposed to be*.  In order to know what Fedora really
>> is, a person would need to look over the updates that have been pushed
>> to F-11 and F-12 and compare those to what's in rawhide and maybe F-13
>> and see if wholesale package updates are being reserved for rawhide or
>> if wholesale updates are being pushed on down into the stable releases.
>>  At that point you would know for sure what Fedora is, not what it's
>> supposed to be.  I say this because, obviously, different people read
>> the part about First differently and do different things. 
> 
> Right,  there are obviously people who feel that what Fedora Is is
> "broken".  The status quo isn't working, and that's why FESCo or members
> of FESCo are trying to come up with ways to fix that.  A lot of the
> argument here seems to be disagreement about what Fedora Should Be,
> which is precisely an issue the Fedora board has been struggling with.

Which is when I point out that I, personally, like the Mandriva way of
doing things: Bugfixes/Backports as the two update streams with
different goals and allowed updates.  I would prefer to have my home
server on Bugfixes, and my desktop environment on Backports.

But, I could almost guess that a reasonable compromise between the two
update stream model and the single update stream model would be to have
a single update stream, but to treat all those apps normally thought of
as server apps (database servers, dhcp, bind, dnsmasq, dovecot,
sendmail, exim, postfix, blah, blah) as though they existed under the
bugfix model and treat those things most closely related to the day to
day user experience (firefox, thunderbird, gnome, kde, pulseaudio,
openoffice) under the backport model.  Dunno, could be wrong there.
Maybe I'm the only one that draws that particular line between the
packages he would like to see updated versus the ones he wants to see
targeted fixes only in.

If you asked me the same question with my fedora packager hat on, then I
prefer updates in stable releases so I can copy my spec, sources, clog,
and patch files from devel to F-13/F-12/F-11 and just keep everything in
sync.  I freely admit that this is purely a convenience thing for me.
However, I think this clearly demonstrates that doing backports +
bugfixes is no more work than doing devel + bugfixes as the bakcports is
mainly just a copy, build, release cycle that takes no real time.  It's
keeping bugfix releases separate from the new releases that takes time
and effort.  Some people do that now, some don't.  For those that do,
the two stream model would probably be an easy change.  For those that
don't, it would be seen as burdensome since it would be adding the
bugfix side, not the backport side.

Oh, since it was implied several times in this thread by a couple
different people, I feel obliged to point out that I don't think it's
appropriate to assume that if someone wants a stable release then they
should be on Fedora N-1.  I've had machines that were on Fedora N-1
until it became N-2, at which point I upgraded to N.  That I leap
frogged had nothing to do with whether or not I wanted a stable stream.
 Well, it sorta did, the 6 month release cycle was too fast and I put
off upgrading until 1 year passed, and I didn't want to have to upgrade
for another year so I had to jump to N.  The fact that I went to N
instead of N-1 doesn't imply that I want a mainly rolling update now and
to infer so would be incorrect.

-- 
Doug Ledford <dledford at redhat.com>
              GPG KeyID: CFBFF194
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford

Infiniband specific RPMs available at
	      http://people.redhat.com/dledford/Infiniband

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