Michael Schwendt <mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam <at> arcor.de> writes:
*I* believe we flood our users with too many rushed/untested updates. It feels more and more like a rolling release
A rolling release isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is not new software, it's unreliable software. Getting new stable software (such as upstream bugfix releases) in is a good thing. With Fedora, you get bugfixes and sometimes even new features very quickly, with a distribution doing security updates only (e.g. Debian stable) or almost (e.g. RHEL/CentOS), you often have to wait for months if not years to get a fix for your bug. Regressions are usually less of a problem than unfixed bugs: if there's a regression, I can rollback to the last working version, if there's an unfixed bug, there's nothing to upgrade or downgrade to.
which is not too far away from Rawhide.
I separated out that part of the sentence because I disagree with the logic here. Are you seeing a major X.Org X11 upgrade with some regressions in F7/F8 updates? KDE 4 RCs? A rewritten GDM? Yet all this stuff is in Rawhide. Maintainers _know_ what kind of upgrades are not stable enough and/or change too much to push as updates to stable releases. So, sure, the updates are "rolling", but they're a lot more reliable than Rawhide.
The main reason I like Fedora is because the releases are stable, yet up to date. I think we're doing a good job of separating the risky updates (-> Rawhide only) from the bugfix and/or riskless enhancement ones (-> updates).
Certainly. Look at the size of the updates repository and also consider the number of packages, which have superseded eachother. Those users, who don't install a fresh Fedora release during the first two weeks, get to see several hundred updates the first time they run an update tool.
That's a feature.
And after installing so many updates, they see regressions.
Our problem here is that updates-testing doesn't get enough actual testing, not the updates per se. And I think the occasional regression, while annoying, is not as bad as sitting on hundreds of bugs and leaving users with an unusable system for months.
Plus packages that more often than necessary depend on eachother, because once again a "minor version update" of some library broke ABI compatibility and requires subsequent rebuilds of other packages.
IMHO that's a non-issue.
Kevin Kofler