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

[Till Maas]

On Thu December 11 2008, Les Mikesell wrote:

> As has been mentioned before, a totally new package has little risk.
> The problem comes when you push an update that breaks existing
> usability.  Since there is no policy or mechanism to prevent that, every
> user is forced to create their own repo and run a test machine to have
> any chance of avoiding them - or just not use fedora at all.

Nobody is forced to install all updates from Fedora. It is easily possible to 
cherry pick the updates one wants to have. Security updates and Bugs from 
Fedoras Bugzilla fixed are usually announced with each update. There exist 
also plugins to help you with this. You could also find a group of people who 
want to cherry pick updates and e.g. announce them in a way that a yum plugin 
only installs them.

> Anyone who _wants_ todays bugs from upstream can always grab their
> tarball and build it under /usr/local/ with the big advantage of having
> a way back when they find it doesn't quite work.

You can also uninstall broken packages with rpm or even better create an 
update with bugs fixed and install it. Also building the tarball does not help 
to verify, whether the package really builds with Fedora, e.g. because of the 
RPM_OPT_FLAGS and it also does not scale if one has more than one machine.

> Majority?  It only takes one broken update to wreck your machine.

I haver had to reinstall any Fedora machine since I began using it with FC4 
because of a broken update and even if it happens once, it is a risk I am 
willing to take. If I have to live with even more unfixed bugs for a long 
period, this would be way worse.

Regards,
Till
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