Where are we going? (Not a rant)

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 12/07/2012 03:11 PM, Andrew Price wrote:
> Ah the ol' Fedora stability improvement thread. It must be Friday. Ok, 
> I'll bite.
>
> This sort of conversation often comes and goes without much being 
> done. Usually it consists of debates between three camps:
>
> 1. Those who see Fedora as an intrinsically unstable distro which 
> showcases and attracts testing for the latest upstream work
> 2. Those who want Fedora to be stable enough to become a realistic 
> alternative to Windows and Ubuntu for the general masses
> 3. Those who want Fedora to be stable enough and supported for long 
> enough to be used as a server OS
>
> I think the reason nothing happens is due to the core issue not being 
> agreed upon by all camps. It's very difficult to make progress on a 
> solution unless you first understand and agree on the problem.

Fedora LTS first and foremost needs maintainers willing to commit to it.

>
> However, if you're still interested I've laid out some ideas, based on 
> my belief that instability is a significant problem, below.
>
> On 07/12/12 12:53, Tomas Radej wrote:
>> One of the results was a conversation I had with a few guys to
>> whom I recommended Fedora as a development environment. It showed me
>> that there's indeed something wrong. While they all said that Fedora's
>> features were brilliant, they unanimously rejected Fedora as a
>> primary system. The reason they gave me was, now quoting: It doesn't
>> really work.
>
> One hypothesis is that too few people use Rawhide to a point where 
> enough testing gets done before final releases. I think making some 
> basic guarantees about Rawhide's stability (it boots, package 
> management works, etc.) would go some way to increase early adoption 
> and ensure bugs are reported and fixed before final releases, thus 
> avoiding many unnecessary updates. I would certainly consider running 
> Rawhide with such guarantees.
>
> Once most of us are dog-fooding Rawhide the temptation to release the 
> latest unstable upstream code in stable release updates would be 
> significantly reduced and our update policy could be tightened to 
> disallow version bumps, etc. in stable release updates similar to 
> other, more popular distros' update policies.
>
> I think this is a better first step forward than LTS releases because 
> it focuses on users' first impressions of Fedora by increasing the 
> stability level on the day of release.

If you want to improve "Rawhide" and it's stability get 
developers/maintainers to run rawhide on their daily bases.

Not going to happened afaik.

JBG