Worthless updates

[Matt Domsch]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 08:16:05AM -0600, Chris Adams wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org> wrote:
> > > My own personal opinion is that stable updates should only fix serious
> > > issues, or security problems. Fedora has such a short lifetime as it is,
> > > I really can't see the value in pushing features to F11 when it will die
> > > soon. I think it's far better to leave the churn in rawhide.

+1.  IMHO, The N-1 (F11) release should get minimal updates.

> If Fedora is going to be a rolling update package collection (despite
> what Kevin tries to claim about some mythical "semi-rolling", that's
> what we are getting in some quarters), then stop the releases every 6
> months.  There's no point; put a little more effort into the respins
> instead and release those every 4-6 months as point releases.  Have an
> annual roll-up release and then keep rolling.

This is interesting... Similar in spirit to the Unity team's Respins.
There could be only one "released supported distribution" (note, not a
version, there would be no version, so no more of this N-1, N-2
nonsense) - just a rawhide snapshot, spun out into media, but with
updates always flowing...

I'd like to see this.

Oh - we have this!  It's called rawhide.  Restore the ISO generator
process every so often so people can get something to install from,
and you're good to go.

The _only_ reason to name something with a 'version' or a 'release' is
to provide a set point for consistency, either in people's minds
(marketing), or to provide a technical baseline for interoperability.
If we continue to take the technical baselines, and move them ad-hoc,
it's no longer a meaningful value.  We might as well move to SCM
snapshot-of-the-day.  For those that want that, you're entitled to do
so, even under the umbrella of the Fedora Project, but quite likely
not within the Fedora distribution mechanisms itself.  That isn't what
Fedora is, or should be.  I don't believe the majority of
our users want that churn.

I added a proposal to this page to codify my thoughts.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Lifecycle_Proposals


-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO
linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux