What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Bradley Baetz]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Bradley Baetz wrote:
>> Can someone who wants the new versions immediately explain why they
>> don't want to wait an average of 3 months for the next fedora release?
> 
> Because if you need the bugfix or the new feature now, any wait is too long.

Why is waiting for a new feature for 3 months too long? Excluding 
support for new hardware, if you want a bleeding edge feature run rawhide.

Note that I'm *NOT* objecting to bugfixes, or new packages, or trying to 
force maintainers to backport individual fixes.

> Also because you'll then also get those major changes which were
> intentionally not pushed as updates to that release, e.g. KDE 4 for Fedora
> 9, kdepim 4, Amarok 2, digiKam 0.10 and Krusader 2 for Fedora 10, probably
> KOffice 2 for Fedora 11.

So you want the latest and greatest new version, as long as its not too new?

> And because if you don't want new versions, you can use CentOS or Debian
> stable or Ubuntu or openSUSE or any other distribution which does not push
> version updates to releases. Why take away Fedora's unique selling point?
> If you don't like the way Fedora works, you should be using another
> distribution, not trying to strong-arm Fedora into working the way you
> want.

There's a difference between pushing new versions that fix bugs, and 
pushing them the day after an upstream release to stable and rawhide 
simultaneously, with a comment of 'new version'.

I enable updates-testing on occasion, and test updates, and file bugs. 
But I do that knowing that stuff has a higher risk of breaking, and its 
my choice. Similarly, when I upgrade from F9 to F10 I expect something 
won't work right (whether or not that's a good thing is a different 
question that I don't want to get into).

I don't think its unreasonable for a user, once they've installed a 
distribution, to keep using it and its stable updates without wireless 
breaking (multiple times), printers to stop working, NM to stop working, 
or gphoto to stop talking to my camera.

None of those are hypothetical, BTW. And yes, I filed bugs, bisected 
upstream git trees, and supplied patches, but I shouldn't have to wonder 
what each stable push will break - if I wanted that I'd use rawhide. 
Yes, finding and fixing those bugs in F9 meant that the bug wasn't in 
F10, but to a user who just wants to Get Stuff Done and isn't going to 
upgrade to F10 on release day, thats not a positive.

My point is that every update may fix things, but it may also break 
things. There's a risk/reward tradeoff that is different for different 
packages and maybe there's a sample bias too (ie we only see the 
packages that go out when they break stuff, and never have several 
hundred post threads about packages that are held back for rawhide).

Bradley