Proposal for the future of Fedora

Jon Masters jonathan at jonmasters.org
Wed Sep 29 18:45:07 UTC 2010


On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 07:26 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:

> > 2) We need a new policy regarding branching. Currently, the new and
> > upcoming version of Fedora is branched from Rawhide at the moment that
> > development begins on it. This needs to change.
> > 
> > Instead of branching from Rawhide, I think Fedora N+1 should be branched
> > from Fedora N. Rawhide should remain an exciting think-tank of
> > in-development features, but we should always plan for Fedora N+1 to be
> > a more stable environment. In this way, it should be first of all easy
> > for developers to upgrade their system into Fedora Branched.
> > 
> 
> This is, I feel, the most important part of my proposal here. If nothing
> else from this email is addressed, I think this needs to be.
> 
> Rawhide CANNOT function as a rapid development environment if it is
> regularly Branched. There are many projects that benefit from the
> ability to use Rawhide for long periods of time to stabilize a new
> feature before it belongs in a stable release.
> 
> Currently, such contributors have only two options:
> 1) Keep an eye out for when Rawhide is going to branch and unpush their
> packages until after the branch is done, then re-create them.
> 2) After the branch is done, bump the epoch on their package in the
> Branch and revert it to a known good state (or pull it completely from
> the Branch, if it's a new package)
> 
> Both of these approaches are highly disruptive to a working development
> environment.
> 
> I think that it really only makes sense for development to branch from
> the previous STABLE release (plus updates). It should be the
> responsibility of package maintainers to manually move rawhide packages
> into the Branch at that time. Then they can more easily decide when
> development is truly ready for inclusion in a stable release.

FWIW, +1. This would be awesome and very much overdue if it happened.

Jon.




More information about the advisory-board mailing list