Rolling release model philosophy (was Re: Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID)))

[Alek Paunov]

On 04.11.2012 19:25, Simo Sorce wrote:

> note that this is "also" our strength in some respect because it allows
> the system to evolve a lot more quickly, but it also means upgrades are

Indeed.

> simply going to break stuff, and that's not so great for desktop
> environments and scare the hell off of 3rd party vendors.
> You may notice we do not have many 3rd party vendors, I think ABI
> instability is reason number, 1, 2 and 3 of why we can't have reliable
> third parties with a community built OS.
>

I agree completely with all your points.

A possibly viable alternative for the ABIs freezing (which we can not 
ensure anyway) is the C/C++/etc tooling - If we arm upstreams, packagers 
and 3rd parties with powerful source tools (API migration/checking), 
just like Google does internally, unsing the  Clang tooling, witch was 
developed exactly for this purpose.

The GCC/OpenJDK tooling development is not something appropriate as 
effort for the manpower of almost any upstream, but IMHO should be seen 
as important goal for relatively big player like Fedora.

Kind Regards,
Alek