Worthless updates

[Thomas Janssen]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Once upon a time, Thomas Janssen <thomasj at fedoraproject.org> said:
>> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Jon Masters <jonathan at jonmasters.org> wrote:
>> > My own personal opinion is that stable updates should only fix serious
>> > issues, or security problems. Fedora has such a short lifetime as it is,
>> > I really can't see the value in pushing features to F11 when it will die
>> > soon. I think it's far better to leave the churn in rawhide.
>>
>> Rawhide for the masses to stay uptodate? Dont support F-11 well
>> because it will die "soon"?
>
> So to you fixing major bugs and security problems == not supported?  I
> don't think so.

It's not what i call "support it well". I can have security fixes with
every stupid distro in the wild. What's so special there?

>> Why isn't it up to the maintainer to provide latest versions even for
>> "die soon" versions of Fedora if he want to do it?
>
> Because a distribution is about more than being a collection of
> packages!

And?

> Some packagers are turning Fedora into a rolling-update package
> collection instead of a coherent distribution.  Remeber the days of a
> fairly small package set in RHL, when people dumped whatever they found
> on rpmfind.net on their system?  They'd then ask a question on a list
> about RHL version foo, and you just about had to get an "rpm -qai" to
> figure out what was going on.
>
> Right now, if somebody asks a question about F12 Firefox, you have a
> reasonable expectation that it is 3.5.x.  If they ask about F12 KDE, who
> knows.
>
> A distribution should have a coherent set of rules about what makes up
> the distribution.  Fedora has lots of rules and guidelines, but really
> nothing about what packagers should do about updates.  Without that,
> Fedora is turning into chaos.
>
> What we have right now is the wild west; what we need is update
> sheriffs.

If you want RHEL, use it.

> On my mirror, updates/12 is approaching the size of releases/12/Fedora
> (which includes CD and DVD ISOs!), and that is in under 4 months.  That
> is an insane amount of churn.  Users do complain about it, when they
> install from a release DVD a few months after release and then spend
> hours downloading updates.

And they *have* to update everything because?

>> If someone think he doesn't need an particular update, dont update it.
>> I never had a gun pointing to my head telling me i HAVE to update
>> everything.
>
> Because users can't be expected to know what needs updating and what
> does not.
>
> If Fedora is going to be a rolling update package collection (despite
> what Kevin tries to claim about some mythical "semi-rolling", that's
> what we are getting in some quarters), then stop the releases every 6
> months.  There's no point; put a little more effort into the respins
> instead and release those every 4-6 months as point releases.  Have an
> annual roll-up release and then keep rolling.
>
> If instead Fedora is going to try to be a stable, coherent distribution,
> then only bug (including security) fix and probably hardware support
> (e.g. kernel, xorg) updates (and any necessary dependencies) should be
> pushed.  Minor version updates are okay, but major version updates (and
> ABI breakage) are to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

Please read the answer i posted to Mathieu Bridon. Saves me to write
everything twice, thank you.

-- 
LG Thomas

Dubium sapientiae initium