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

[Jon Masters]

On Sun, 2010-03-14 at 18:17 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Jon Masters wrote:
> > If the only reason to choose Fedora over Ubuntu is because Fedora shoves
> > out updates at a higher pace into stable releases, then something is
> > severely wrong.
> 
> Why? It's exactly what's happening out there in the real world you chose to 
> ignore, yet I don't see anything wrong with it.

If you would confine your concerns to KDE, which it sounds is all you
are really worried about, then let's give KDE a giant exemption for KDE
updates if the rest of the distribution could benefit from less churn.

> If something regresses, there's always the old version to rollback to. If 
> the hardware is just not supported, there's nothing to fall back to.

People who have other things to do don't have time to keep several
different updates around, and do their own QA cycle on Fedora stable
updates, before deploying them. That's what rawhide is for - I know if
my rawhide breaks I'm not relying on it anyway so I can just fix it
later on, whenever. Honestly, it sounds like you're arguing against what
I see as the value of even having stable releases.

> > This isn't Enterprise Linux. I don't need a support period covering the
> > equivalent of 14 Fedora release cycles, I am fully happy with some
> > considerable churn every 6 or 12 months on my desktop or laptop in the
> > interest of being up to date with the latest tech, but I am not happy to
> > have that churn be on a normal non-upgrade day when I expect my laptop
> > to work (and an update just before a meeting to be safe with respect to
> > that laptop running a presentation immediately afterward). Somewhat
> > shockingly, some people do use Fedora for day to day stuff.
> 
> Then do your updates AFTER that presentation, not before. Where's the 
> problem?

We seem to fundamentally disagree on quality expectations. My view is
that quality means being able to do an update at any time with a
reasonable expectation that nothing will blow up in the process. I think
you might be surprised at how many users also expect this when you label
something as an "update" and offer it to them in a popup balloon.

Jon.