Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Mon Dec 22 20:45:30 UTC 2008


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>
>> The version where the RHEL cut happens would track whatever happens to 
>> RHEL to the point that the update repos could be repointed to Centos 
>> when it appears without breakage.  If it doesn't satisfy fedora 
>> developers to build towards stability even through one version out of 
>> 3 or 4, fedora could just start it's next version early to absorb the 
>> new untested stuff.
> 
> If I understand correctly, your idea is to base a longer update cycle of 
> Fedora only on versions that Red Hat itself bases Red Hat Enterprise 
> Linux on.

Yes, I think that is the only practical option since I don't foresee 
stability coming from fedora itself.  And realistically this is going to 
happen on the end users' computers that need stability anyway whether it 
is a planned and easy update or a harder wipe/re-install/re-configure. 
The difference being that a wipe/reinstall is also going to be a time to 
re-evaluate whether you care enough about the disto's sysadmin tools 
(that aren't serving you well since you have to start over) to stay on 
the same track or whether you want to jump to a different system that 
might be less trouble to deal with.

 > However which release it is going to be, isn't known in
> advance since RHEL release schedules aren't known in advance.
> 
> Even if it is, RHEL is not always a snapshot of some Fedora release. 

So far the surprises have been rare.

> Sometimes it is earlier than a release. There is also the case of Fedora 
> updates moving past RHEL like FC6 updates did.

That's something that could be fixed.  How hard is it to not update 
something?

> RHEL also makes a number of configuration changes and there are 
> dependency differences between them as a result.  How do you account for 
> all that differences in updates? Fedora includes about 5 times more 
> software packages than RHEL. What about security updates for all those 
> software that is in Fedora but not in RHEL ?  That gap continues to 
> increase as well since the Fedora repository continues to grow at a 
> rapid rate while RHEL repository size don't grow that much.

Aren't those mostly in EPEL?  Or, since we are talking about the next 
version, aren't they expected to be in EPEL?  Or should people not be 
using them when planning projects that will run on enterprise versions?

>  > But the point is that whatever RHEL does, I wish the fedora release 
>  >that spawned it would do the same
> 
> What the advantage of cloning the same thing twice?

There's no additional human effort in cloning.  What's the point of 
having software licenses that permit re-use if in fact you don't reuse 
it once you get it right?

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com




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