Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/12/2010 05:07 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 03/12/2010 08:46 PM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>> This is extremely poor attitude Kevin and reeks of arrogance.  Talking
>>> down on users and contributors who don't have the privilege of high
>>> bandwidth connections isn't what I expected from you.  Nothing left to say.
>>>
>> Fedora had never been usable on really low bandwidth from its first day
>> on - Telling otherwise is simply not true.
> The past does not dictate the future even assuming this claim is true.

I know this is true from personal experience and I remember having told 
you so several before.

[I live in a "DSL white spot" in Germany and have been using Fedora over 
modem, ISDN and low bandwidth DSL for several years.]

> The reality is that we are hardly going to get a fairly small percentage of free and open source apps in the Fedora repository assuming that we are wildly successful and in reality, ABI breakages are going to cause problems for many of our users including users with internal applications.  If someone refuses to accept this reality and want to live in the ideal world where everything is packaged and available in some repo, their solutions are not going to work out well.  Acknowledging that we can do better would be a good first step.  I am not saying that, ABI breakages should be avoided at all cost (that holds true for EL as well) but we can make avoid some of more gratuitous ones atleast.
I don't see any connection between this remark and using Fedora on low 
bandwidth system.

As I already said: The only option to use Fedora (or any other 
non-static distro - The same consideration applies to other distros, as 
well) with low bandwidth connectivity is applying package update 
filtering, being picky on update schedules and being picky about package 
selection.

That said, when I used to be restricted to bandwidth, I e.g. often opted 
to temporarily ignore certain updates (e.g. kernel, desktop or 
openoffice updates) and only applied those updates, of which I knew were 
having a direct impact on me.

Ralf