fedora 7 schedule (was Re: Fedora 7 planing)

[Jeremy Katz]

On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:47 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > I'm not saying that we cannot do some amount of damage control but if
> > the choice is:
> >  1. patch out some feature (and therefore OWN that fork)
> >  2. ship the newer, broken one
> >  3. ship the older one
> > 
> > None of those options are terribly good.
> 
> Both the GNOME and the historical Red Hat Linux take on this would 
> usually be 3, ship the older one. 1 or 4 were only done for 
> business-type reasons such as "we really need NPTL for a customer" but 
> those reasons are now supposed to be for RHEL, in fact part of the idea 
> of Fedora was/is to get rid of them.
> 
> 3 is the only one that is guaranteed to ship a stable product without 
> causing a delay. 1 can also ship stable product without a delay, but 
> only if you know you can assign someone to do the work in a finite 
> timeframe. If 1 becomes "hope someone patches the feature" then 1 can 
> mean delay. 4 almost invariably means delay.

When we're talking about the kernel, though, 3 _isn't_ guaranteed to be
a stable product ;)  If you go back to a previous kernel release, then
perhaps you've just lost all the security improvements.  Or lost the
ability to support hardware that's been released in the intervening six
months since Fn-1.

Jeremy