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

[Les Mikesell]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 08:38 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> You have to decide: do you want updates or do you not want them? If you
>> don't want to wait for the next CentOS release, then obviously you need the
>> update quickly, so you are in Fedora's target base. But then you can't
>> complain that you get updates too quickly! You can't have both ways.
>> (You're one of those users with contradictory requirements I mentioned
>> elsewhere in this thread.)
> 
> Updates != upgrades.
> 
> I think frequent updates to given package set to fix bugs is great.
> Frequent upgrades to a package set for new upstream features, behavior,
> bugs, incompatibilities is not so great.
> 
> With the 6 month cycle of Fedora, and our willingness to break things
> like crazy in the rawhide world, we're still a very very fast distro and
> unique in the distro space for early adoption of software.  This all
> comes /without/ even considering what we do for updates to our releases.
> Even if our releases only got bugfixes, we're still uniquely agile to
> new software and technologies and very fast to new releases using those
> things.

That would also be the simplest possible solution to the scenario of 
satisfying both people who want bleeding-edge and stability.  If the 
first 3 months of a cycle were dedicated to getting the 'best' code 
possible (including new features, etc.) and the subsequent life was to 
the extent possible, restricted to only bug/security fixes, you could 
simply wait to upgrade the more important machines until the system 
stabilized.  And for people who want the new features you are now down 
to a worst-case of only 3 months to the next release.  This is, of 
course, complicated by upstream developers bundling features and fixes 
and the decisions really have to be left to the packagers but some 
generic policy in this direction might help.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com