New bodhi release in production

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Tue Aug 17 19:53:59 UTC 2010


Bill Nottingham wrote:
> You can build some faster-moving feature packages on top of a stable base
> for those that want it.

In theory you can. In practice that turns out to work rather poorly. It's 
the model several other distros are using; their "feature updates" 
repositories are always underused by maintainers, poorly supported, used by 
many users in a selective fashion (which causes dependency issues) etc. It 
also means there are effectively 2 incompatible versions of "Fedora n", 
unless we ban library upgrades altogether, which makes it impossible to 
provide e.g. a current KDE (something which also plagues other distros' 
implementations of this idea; often, KDE updates are in yet another separate 
repo etc.).

I think the way we've been handling this – upgrade or get lost – is the only 
one that works.

That said, of course I prefer having an 'optional repo for feature updates' 
than not being allowed to push them on Fedora infrastructure at all. It's 
just that I doubt about the viability of the idea.

I also have some concern about the actual implementation: I've read that one 
idea that was floated was to shut down updates-features for Fn after the 
Fn+1 release. But that means people who use updates-features effectively 
have their support cycle cut by half! (It is not feasible to downgrade to 
the conservative updates, and the stuff installed from updates-features also 
requires security fixes!) (And in fact this kind of second-class support is 
exactly one of the problems of having the features relegated to a separate 
repo.)

        Kevin Kofler



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