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)))

[Simon Lukasik]

On 11/04/2012 05:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Lukasik <isimluk at fedoraproject.org> writes:
>> Currently, each Fedora release is kept alive for 13(+/-) months. There
>> were dozens of threads about shortening or prolonging period -- but I am
>> not sure if something like the following has been ever discussed:
> 
>> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==1 -- is alive for 7 months.
>> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==2 -- is alive for 7 months.
>> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==0 -- is alive for 19 months.
> 
>> Additionally, maintainers might be encouraged to push their system wide
>> changes into N%3==1. As well as they might be encouraged to make the
>> Fedora N%3==0 their best bread.
> 
> Wouldn't that just encourage 99% of average users to ignore the
> short-lived releases?  It would sure be a damn tempting approach for me.
> (Personally, all I want out of Fedora is a stable platform to get my
> work done on, and the less often I have to reinstall, the better.)
> 

If You are suggesting that the majority of our users would prefer
stability over features......well, in that case we may have something to
think about.

> I think what you'd have using the short-lived releases is just the same
> kind of brave souls who are willing to run rawhide or pre-release
> branched systems.  And there aren't that many of them, so you'd get
> little QA, which would help to ensure those releases remain buggy, thus
> creating a nasty feedback loop that further helps to drive away people
> whose main interest is not in helping to debug the system.  Eventually
> the short-lived releases would just be rawhide-with-a-different-name.
> 
> 			regards, tom lane