Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Terry Barnaby]

On 13/03/10 01:45, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Al Dunsmuir wrote:
>> And  turning  all  releases  into  rolling  branches helps keep things
>> sane?
>>
>> Please call a spade a spade. Without a reduction in churn in the stable
>> releases that is what they become and remain until EOL - a rolling branch.
>
> No, a "semi-rolling" branch, as in a branch which picks up rolling feature
> upgrades WITHOUT the disruption and breakage inherent to a rolling branch,
> which instead only happens from one release to another. In other words, the
> best of both worlds (release-based and rolling).
>
>          Kevin Kofler
>
It is generally "new features" that break things. The core part of a "stable" 
release is that it has a known set of features that users and developers can
base their work on. This allows users to use the system and progress with
their own work. Some people still predominately use Fedora rather than work
on it.

The Fedora "stable" system has become more and more unstable I believe
due to the move to more frontier "new features" and quicker almost untested 
updates. For an individual user most new features are of no benefit at all,
some times they are a disadvantage.

Last night I was helping some school kids with a powerpoint presentation
they had written. They had, not un-reasoanbly, used FontWork titles.
Under F12 with OpenOffice 3.1 it took 3 minutes to load the 10 slide file
and about 1 minute between slides. Editing was basically impossible.
I had to go back to a F8 system OpenOffice 2.x system to edit the FontWork
out. How on earth did this "release" get out (Fedora/OpenOffice ??) ??
This is just one of many basic issues I and others have had with Fedora
recently.

Fedora has to have some actual users otherwise there is no real testing
done and no real developer/user communication.

I do think Rawhide is the place for real frontier work, but it seems to be
moving more and more into stable. Maybe that is because more front end
developers are working with Fedora and less users ?

Terry