Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

[Rahul Sundaram]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>  > 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.

That's not a real answer. Whether it is rare or not, is has occurred and 
you need to have a plan to deal with that.

>> 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?

Pretty hard actually. You can't stagnate a released distribution for 
obvious reasons. FC6 is released. It has to be updated to include 
security fixes, bug fixes ... RHEL 5 has branched off but it would take 
another six months (internal testing, alpha, beta, partner testing etc) 
  or so even before it is released. Remember, nobody in the Fedora world 
  know the exact schedule in advance so they can't plan for it.

>> 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?  

You have completely ignored the point of configuration and dependency 
differences which means you can't just use the same stream of updates 
from RHEL in Fedora as you think you can.

Fedora and EPEL package count don't match at all. Go ahead and compare.

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?

Fedora still has way more packages than RHEL + EPEL and since you have 
to find maintainers and the upstream versions might depend on newer 
versions of software only available in the latest Fedora (remember EPEL 
packages cannot conflict with what is available in base RHEL), some will 
not build for a earlier version available in RHEL and the problem gets 
progressively worse as more versions of Fedora get much ahead of RHEL.

>>  > 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?

That wasn't my question. My question is why not just use RHEL or CentOS 
if you just going to duplicate the same stream of updates for Fedora as 
well? It just seems busy work for no benefit.

Rahul