why I'm using Ubuntu instead of Fedora ATM

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2007 03:59:14 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:

> * QA: Ubuntu aggressively pushes people to use their development
                                   ^^^^^^
"people" == "all people"? i.e. not just users, but also packagers

> branch and report problems, which leads to better, more stable final
> releases. At the time I chose to use Ubuntu, people were not just not
> encouraged, but actively discouraged from using rawhide. This is
> improving, but at the time, I felt that this difference meant that
> Ubuntu would be better QA'd (and it was no surprise, at least to me,
> that Ubuntu has not yet had bad release bugs like the FC5 GPL module
> kernel bug.[2])

The first thing that would need to happen is to push the developers and
packagers to keep Rawhide *including* "Fedora Extras development"
up-to-date. Plus bringing back the goal to have *all* packages rebuilt
for Test1.

It is not just the infamous "Package EVR problems in FC+FE" report, which
has been posted to fedora-maintainers list for quite a while, that shows
how the development distribution is neglected by the packagers. It lists
problems where software _versions_ (not just package release numbers) are
lower than what has been published for the older distributions.

Only if it is possible to upgrade from FC-6 to Rawhide, users can be asked
to try out the development packages. If, however, many packagers don't
even care about submitting simple package rebuild jobs, there is a lot of
undiscovered breakage. Compilation failures, API changes, run-time
breakage after successful rebuilds, necessity to request help from
upstream, which may take some time, plus other fun. And the late discovery
of such problems when e.g. FESCO takes over and performs a semi-automated
mass-rebuild close before the release of Fedora Core.