On Sat, 2010-08-14 at 10:32 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Martin Sourada wrote:
> There are also bazillion distributions out there who are on the bleeding
> edge.
But none that have the current stuff without blatant breakage as updates to
the stable releases, and ship the exciting but disruptive changes in new
releases every 6 months, while still supporting the previous release for 7
more months from that point.
There's a balance between bleeding edge and conservativeness. Fedora was
exactly where I, and many other people, who chose Fedora exactly for that
reason (just look at some of the user feedback, e.g. Adam Williamson's poll
on the Fedora Forums, some mails to the kde(a)lists.fp.o ML etc., I'm not
inventing that "many other people" part), wanted it to be on that balance
(except for some odd packages like Firefox and OO.o where the maintainers
did their own thing, basically already following what the new unwanted
policy will be). Now new policies are tilting the scale way too far towards
conservativeness, to the point where we don't distinguish us anymore from
other distributions; Rawhide, on the other hand, is way too far on the
bleeding edge end to be usable for daily use, and this is exactly the issue
with other "bleeding edge" distributions as well.
Not all new upstream versions are equal. New versions with major changes,
especially feature regressions, are NOT suitable as updates to a stable work
environment. Version upgrades WITHOUT such breakage ARE suitable, and
actually WANTED as updates. For example, people EXPECT to be able to use the
latest Firefox (and have complained about the Firefox maintainer being too
conservative with his updates), the latest KDE (and have praised KDE SIG for
being so effective at pushing new versions) etc.
Hehe, I agree here with a lot of what you say, as well as disagree with
a lot of what you say. I generally don't think we should ban enhancement
updates completely, but things like major firefox/kde/gnome/Xorg/kernel
are usually too much. In the past, when I was still using firefox, I
wasn't especially thrilled with it's stability, especially with new
major releases, I still remember the epic fail of having KDE 4.0 in
stable fedora and I now I'm experiencing the trying to push immature
GNOME 3.0 (luckily it was decided in time to push it back another half a
year)...
I like that Fedora is bleeding edge in rawhide, recieves good deal of
testing *before* release and is more or less conservative when it comes
to important stuff after release. That way we can provide our users with
*stable* but sufficiently modern stuff (in many areas even a few months
ahead of other distros). And I think the new policy aligns pretty well
with this.
Martin