Fedora Core 5 Test 3 Slip

Brian Long brilong at cisco.com
Tue Feb 7 16:46:46 UTC 2006


On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 17:03 -0500, D Canfield wrote:
> Mike A. Harris wrote:
> >
> > I think our 6 month cycle plan remains, but will likely vary depending
> > on various factors.  I'd like to see it be a 9 month cycle that can
> > vary earlier or later though, but that's just my personal opinion.  I
> > dunno who else would agree with me on that. ;)
> >
> 
> Perhaps this is just my own experience and impressions, but through the 
> RHL releases and even as recently as the first couple of FC releases, I 
> was always eagerly awaiting each new release because of various great 
> improvements that made the system more generally usable.  As tired as I 
> would get of constantly rebuilding my machine, I would install most of 
> the test releases just because I wanted those features that badly.  With 
> FC 3 & 4, my "appetite" for new releases has slowed down significantly, 
> and the only reason I look for betas nowadays is usually support for 
> newer hardware.  In fact, the only two things I'm eager for in FC5 are a 
> working suspend on my thinkpad, and evolution syncing on my Treo 
> (neither of which looks is looking too promising anymore).
> 
> The point of all that is to say that I think as FC and Linux/OSS mature, 
> there will be less demand for a steady stream of updates, and a 9-12 
> month release cycle would probably be quite acceptable.  In fact, if 
> things go the direction they seem to be, most people would probably 
> prefer a longer-lived Core infrastructure, and look more to Extras for 
> faster-moving updates to day-to-day apps.
> 
> Just my perception.

DC,

I would agree with you.  Inside my company, many folks have switched to
self-supported Ubuntu or Gentoo because of the rolling-upgrade
functionality where they don't have to re-install the entire OS to get
the latest features.  It would be really cool if Jeremy and the rest of
the installer team worked to make rolling upgrades between releases of
Fedora (and RHEL) possible with standard yum commands instead of
requiring a new install/upgrade procedure each time.

Internally, we don't support Anaconda's "upgrade" mode because it's had
issues over the years and we don't want to clean up the mess  :)  This
means we have to tell folks to reinstall their OS between major versions
of RHEL and the same holds true between FC2 -> FC3 -> FC4.

After hearing all these complaints internally, I'd say it would be
absolutely _awesome_ if I were able to upgrade from FC5 -> FC6 without
running Anaconda.

Has any serious thought gone into this?  Is it a high, medium or low
priority for future development or is it not even on the radar at this
point?

/Brian/

-- 
       Brian Long                      |         |           |
       IT Data Center Systems          |       .|||.       .|||.
       Cisco Linux Developer           |   ..:|||||||:...:|||||||:..
       Phone: (919) 392-7363           |   C i s c o   S y s t e m s




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