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

Stephen Warren s-t-rhbugzilla at wwwdotorg.org
Thu Dec 11 06:42:27 UTC 2008


Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Stephen Warren wrote:
>> Alternatively (to a rolling distro), we could increase the frequency of
>> Fedora releases. It seems that the main reason people want the latest
>> stuff thrown into Fedora $latest is because they don't want to wait for
>> the next release in just 3 months time on average. So, make "the next
>> release" happen every 3, or 2, or 1 months (-> wait is 1.5, 1, 0.5
>> months average). I don't know about capacity-wise, but the Fedora
>> infra-structure certainly seems to have the logic in place now for
>> managing arbitrary numbers of current releases.
> 
> That's not really feasible, it would be a lot more work to maintain and
> require a lot more bandwidth and disk space for mirrors. And it wouldn't
> bring any benefits over the current system.

The benefit would be waiting less time for significant package updates
(i.e. new versions for the sake of new features, or significant new
versions for the sake of bugfixes) if Fedora had a policy that each
release should be somewhat stable during its lifetime, and updates in a
release should be minimal/stable/...

> As for a rolling release model, that may be more feasible, but again what
> are the benefits over the current model? And it'd have the major drawback
> that users could no longer decide on their own when to upgrade e.g. to KDE
> 4 (for which right now they have a window of ~7 months).

I didn't propose that so much because it had benefits, but more because
if maintainers are free to (and even encouraged, because Fedora is
bleeding edge, and that's what it takes to be bleeding edge) to keep F
$latest updated with the latest releases of some/most/all software, then
we essentially already have a rolling release (it just gets renamed F8,
F9, F10 every 6 months), so why not just be explicit/honest about it.




More information about the devel mailing list