On Thu, 2006-27-04 at 15:52 -0700, John Wendel wrote:
Here's your chance to slap me up side of the head!
Reading the Debian thread (and others) has made me wonder why Fedora
has to have "releases" at all. Why not have a continuously evolving
distribution? One would start by downloading an "installer system"
that would then use the existing mechanisms (yum, whatever) to update
itself. From this point on, why would one need "releases"? Just keep
releasing updates and new packages exactly as things are done now.
I know there must be something wrong with this scenario; would someone
like to hit me with a clue stick.
This thread is to long too read every entry. In case nobody has
mentioned it ;
The reason for releases is to allow for significant changes
to fundamental libraries that could break many things or
require almost every package to be updated at the same time.
I am not completely familiar with Debian, but other OSes use
a similar development/stable branch system. You may have
misread or been mislead, because most similar systems still
have releases for the reasons I stated above, but the only
time the releases change is when a significant change is
made, and not based on a time schedule. Periodically such
systems also have patch releases that fix security or
stability issues and require significant package updates.