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

[Bradley Baetz]

Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:17 AM, Bradley Baetz <bbaetz at acm.org> wrote:
>> But what, specifically, were you missing?
> 
> I also use Fedora as my primary OS, and seeing as most OSS software
> brings new features and bug fixes with each release, what's not to
> want with a new update?

The pain of breaking something that was already working as part of 
getting security and other critical bugfixes?

Again, I agree that one of Fedora's strengths is the ability to deliver 
new features and bug fixes to existing releases. I'm just saying that 
the risks mean that there needs to be a reason apart from the fact that 
there *are* new features to push an update.

> Shouldn't one be able to stay within the
> package management system and be as up to date with Windows/Mac
> software where packages are manually downloaded?

I guess that depends on whether you consider Fedora to be a distribution 
method for a collection of separate packages, which are all able to be 
updated to the latest and greatest, or if you consider it as a product 
that, as an implementation detail, happens to contain lots of separate 
projects' work.

Fedora-the-product has a set of features. Some of its components get new 
features upstream, and then Fedora-the-product+1 gets those too. 
Fedora-the-packageset has a lot of packages that are always able to be 
updated, and Fedora-the-packageset+1 is published in a more convenient 
form that the previous version+updates, with new features that were 
mostly omitted from updates for logistical reasons.

Of course, reality is somewhere in between the two.

Bradley