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

Michael Schwendt mschwendt at gmail.com
Fri Dec 12 19:55:06 UTC 2008


On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:15:55 -0600, Arthur wrote:

> We will have to agree to disagree on this as I found none of the
> reasons he gave substantive. I'll wait to see what looks like may be a
> new pace of releases play out. I will say that I find the tone of the
> proposed changes to be overly conservative and overall unfortunate.
> But if that's what the majority wishes, so be it.

You could still run with updates-testing enabled to get many more updates
and upgrades than with stock Fedora plus only the stable updates
repository. Updates-testing for the bleeding edge fan-boys. The gold
release plus stable updates for the masses.

At the current pace of development it's necessary to fix a Fedora gold
release with quite a lot of bug-fixes, often even zero-day updates.
However, (and although it can't be generalised) there is no necessity to
replace tested components of a gold release with major upgrades without
spending roughly the same amount of testing on them. That's what
updates-testing is for.

Under consideration of your earlier messages, are you trying to say that
with Fedora one cannot be productive without hundreds of updates and
upgrades?

Perhaps you don't know that Fedora already has a policy that protects the
buildroots from being broken with ABI/API incompatible updates. For such
updates it is necessary to either contact Release Engineering or push such
updates to stable first. Recent development is that packagers run into
that hurdle and instead of understanding it as a warning ("uh, oh, trouble
ahead - I better don't do that") they skip updates-testing only to learn
via the painful way that by doing it they've broken the stable distribution.

Every update that skips updates-testing (or uses it only for a very short
period) should require the maintainer to give a rationale.

With all the uproar because of dbus and packagekit update mistakes, please
don't forget that problems with Fedora are not limited to those two
packages. Every broken dependency bears the risk of blocking a user's
machine from seeing important updates until either the user works around
it or the update is fixed. Every broken update bears the risk of becoming
the annoyance that causes him to reconsider choosing Fedora. I don't think
we want that.

And if we are unable to put updates-testing to a better effect and at
the same time put security-fixes and major bug-fixes rather quickly
into the stable repo, that only proves that we no longer cannot handle
the high number of updates and their inter-package dependencies.




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