Where are we going? (Not a rant)

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 03:11:31PM +0000, 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


Hmmm. I don't think I'm in any of those camps. I want Fedora to thrive and
be used, not as an "alternative" but on its own merits. That includes being
a general-purpose OS, both on desktops, on traditional servers, and in the
cloud. It doesn't necessarily mean "the general masses" nor world
domination.

While I *do* think we would benefit from a slightly longer cycle (with an
"security updates only" phase), I don't think that's the only way to tackle
the problem.

For example, making it so key applications and development stacks could
easily float from one base OS to the next would make it less of an issue
when the base OS needs to be upgraded.

Making upgrades incredibly painless is another good but different approach,
making us closer to a rolling release. (I think we're headed that way with
'fedup', but it's going to be a little longer for that to shake out.)

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>