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

[Andy Green]

On 03/13/10 11:46, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On 03/13/2010 11:52 AM, Ville-Pekka Vainio wrote:
>> pe, 2010-03-12 kello 15:20 -0800, Jesse Keating kirjoitti:
>
>> As Fedora is the distribution I'm most familiar with, I've also
>> installed it on some of my family members' systems but lately I've been
>> considering switching those to Ubuntu once the new LTS release comes
>> out.
> You actually want a different distribution, likely a Fedora LTS, not
> current Fedora.
>
> Unfortunately, Fedora's leadership repeatedly had brushed off a Fedora
> LTS as "unmaintainable" and redirected people to CentOS.

But they're right to say it's unmaintainable in the long term aren't 
they?  You said yourself in your impressive summary I agree with:

 >> * Backporting might be simple in some cases, but it might not be
 >> possible or uneffective in others.

What are people meant to do when they commit to stability in the sense 
of not uplevelling things and introducing new code, and then find that 
backporting is "not possible or uneffective"?  It's fair to imagine that 
the upstream and its lib dependencies' HEADs won't stay similar to 
whatever it is that was released in most cases just to make life easy. 
Then the workload is increasingly "nontrivial" or impossible as the 
codebases diverge.

Is the effort and personpower poured into trying to hold the line at 
some arbitrary release not in the end better poured into moving things 
forward and improving them?

I don't ask it idly or without understanding the value of stability at 
the end user, we will be shipping very large numbers of embedded devices 
where updates must not trash or damage the user experience.  I am just 
wondering if the focus on backport-based stability is in the end 
illusory and doomed.

-Andy