Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

[Christof Damian]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 20:12, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> Why not handle those cases similar to how GNOME and Firefox (and IIRC
> OpenOffice.org?) have been handled in the past, where a test/RC release
> was in Fedora leading up to the Fedora release, and the "final" upstream
> release is pushed as an update (if/when needed)?  Going from test/RC to
> final usuaully isn't going to involve major changes (soname bumps, UI
> changes, etc.) and so should be an acceptable update to everybody.

I think that this is the wrong way to go. Whenever this happened there
were a lot of complains from the users and sometimes from upstream.

It basically says we make the releases less stable by using a not
fully tested and finished upstream version, just so that we can have
more stable updates.

I like the idea of stable updates and just tracking upstream in
rawhide, but lets start to make the Fedora releases more stable first.
Otherwise everyone will push the newest broken alpha into rawhide just
before release, in the hope to patch it up with "stable" updates
afterwards.

A six month cycle is not a long time and having test/beta/RC versions
in there just for marketing doesn't make sense.

Christof