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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 15:31 -0600, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 03/12/2010 04:36 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:
> >> And i disagree here. People like that have to face that Fedora or any
> >> similar distro isn't for them.
> >
> > I don't see why you want to continue pushing off users instead of
> > working out a method that satisfies more users.
> 
> Ubuntu's method satisfies more users, that is why they use Ubuntu. 
> People¹ use Fedora because it is leading edge. If we sacrifice that 
> identity, then people¹ won't have any reason to use Fedora over Ubuntu.

Even if we were to institute a more conservative update policy, we
wouldn't necessarily actually sacrifice Fedora's leading-edge nature.

Point The First: Ubuntu's update policy is really extremely
conservative. To a rough approximation they update almost nothing. They
do security fixes. You have to argue really, really hard to get any kind
of bug fixed, though. None of the proposals made so far is anywhere near
as tight as Ubuntu's policy.

Point The Second: post-release updates are not the be-all and end-all.
At release time, Fedora is generally more cutting-edge in at least core
components than the time-equivalent Ubuntu release (and Mandriva, and
SUSE, and yadda yadda). Case in point - F12 and Ubuntu 9.10 are more or
less contemporaneous, yet F12 shipped with newer versions of many
components, notably X server. (We're the _only_ major late-2009 cycle
distro to have shipped X server 1.7, everyone else shipped 1.6). So even
if both followed exactly identical update policies, Fedora would still
be the more 'cutting-edge' release.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net