On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:34 AM, Luis Garrido wrote:
The main reason that I am writing is to ask you about your take on our update strategy in Fedora. Currently, there is a heated discussion in Fedora-devel mailing list about update policies. It might happen that our updates policy might change to a more conservative one.
I thought Fedora filled RedHat's niche for "keeping up with the new features even if stability suffers a bit" distributions. What is "more conservative", exactly?
There are mixed opinions. Some say security and bugfixes but no enhancement updates. Some even go up to pushing security fixes only. Here is a proposal that will be discussed in tomorrow's steering committee meeting: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-March/132730.html
No conclusion has been reached for the time being.
A mature-ish Fedora (i.e., one version below the the current one but still on maintenance, between 6- and 12-months old) is usually a good trade-off. You will always have to deal with some problematic stuff or another, putting down small fires, but that's the blood in the bleeding edge, people should be aware of that when they choose this kind of distro. If you value rock-solid stability over new features go RHEL or CentOS (which I do for my servers.)
:) These were the main arguments that some more "adventurous" package maintainers like me came up with.
I just wanted to hear you folks' opinions, as that's what matters for me most.
Orcan
On Tue, 2010-03-09 at 03:50 -0500, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 3:34 AM, Luis Garrido wrote:
The main reason that I am writing is to ask you about your take on our update strategy in Fedora. Currently, there is a heated discussion in Fedora-devel mailing list about update policies. It might happen that our updates policy might change to a more conservative one.
I thought Fedora filled RedHat's niche for "keeping up with the new features even if stability suffers a bit" distributions. What is "more conservative", exactly?
There are mixed opinions. Some say security and bugfixes but no enhancement updates.
Weird (see below)
Some even go up to pushing security fixes only.
Even weirder. We could have frozen functionality for 6 months worst case! Maybe in mature applications like apache that is reasonable, but in what I consider to be the fast moving world of audio apps that would be too long a wait - and the wait would be for a _full_ update of the os just to get functionality updates for audio apps. Maybe that is part of the purpose of a more stable Fedora? To force users to update to the latest? I have to get some time to read the thread (I have not been following up on the Fedora list, too busy...).
Here is a proposal that will be discussed in tomorrow's steering committee meeting: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-March/132730.html
Well, I wonder if maybe Fedora is going from one extreme to the other. Some updates in the past have been extremely disruptive to users with no intention whatsoever of fixing them after the disruption was made clear[*]. On one hand stopping that kind of major update would be good.
On the other hand maybe some would complain that an upgrade to ardour that adds functionality should not hit stable until the next release of Fedora?
No conclusion has been reached for the time being.
A mature-ish Fedora (i.e., one version below the the current one but still on maintenance, between 6- and 12-months old) is usually a good trade-off. You will always have to deal with some problematic stuff or another, putting down small fires, but that's the blood in the bleeding edge, people should be aware of that when they choose this kind of distro. If you value rock-solid stability over new features go RHEL or CentOS (which I do for my servers.)
:) These were the main arguments that some more "adventurous" package maintainers like me came up with.
I just wanted to hear you folks' opinions, as that's what matters for me most.
As a reference, historically (since 2001) Planet CCRMA has always updated to the latest versions of major packages very fast. Not so much lately, of course (I have not been as responsive as in the past and the packages that have migrated to Fedora lag behind because of the more strict release guidelines there). I used to push updates to major packages within a few days of their release. Some light internal testing and off they went. Maybe a bit too much :-)
But I don't think there was a major protest in the list about that policy, rather the opposite, users were usually happy about having the latest and greatest available sooner rather than later.
There was/is always the option of _not_ upgrading and some users have kept obsolete but working setups for years.
And, BTW, I think you are doing a great job of maintaining the packages!
-- Fernando
[*] An example is the firewire stack. It was broken in fc7 and it is still not usable for audio purposes AFAIK unless you run the Planet CCRMA kernel - maybe that has changed? The end goal is noble (a better firewire stack) but the way to get there did not take into consideration a whole class of users and devices. I think many former Planet CCRMA users did not (wisely) wait for a fix, and migrated elsewhere. Something similar can be said of pulseaudio. Again, a noble and necessary goal, but the way there was/is not the most stable from the point of view of the users. So, basic infrastructure can be broken at will but userland packages can't introduce new features??
-
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano -
Orcan Ogetbil