On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 08:18:04AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 10:21 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
The way I see it, is we have:
rawhide (and for a part of the cycle Fedora #+1 testing) Fedora # Fedora #-1 Fedora #-2
Fedora #+1 is for people who want the bleeding edge Fedora # is for people who want the latest and greatest without too much bleeding Fedora #-1 is for people who want it relatively safe and slow Fedora #-2 Does not fit into this picture
Quite a few people take this view, but I'm not sure it's entirely reliable. As I see it there may well be those who use the system as you suggest - they upgrade every six months but to the *last* release, not the current one, so they're always running F#-1 - but I'm fairly sure there's also those who actually use the current lifecycle system for its stated purpose, which isn't to allow you to constantly run one version out of date, but to run each version for up to twelve months. So they ran F8, then F10, then F12, then F14 - skipping 9, 11 and 13 so they only have to deal with the pain of an update every 12 months. To these types of users, it doesn't necessarily make sense to treat a -1 release differently from a 'current' release.
Note that by and large I agree with the combination of Hans's post (what I wishfully would like Fedora's update policy to be) and yours (that currently to various different people it's one of what Hans posts or an opportunity to skip a release or a no-big-updates-once-released all around).
I'd just like to point out in response to this paragraph that a few people have posted that they appreciate both an initial rolling release style and a 13 month release cycle. They said that they install a Fedora for testing purposes when it first comes out and enjoy the rapid pace of bugfixes as they test the software in their environment. Then, the update pace slows down at about the same time their ready to push things out to the machines in their env.
I think there's likely better ways that they could achieve this if we were optimizing for this, though.
-Toshio