Rolling release model philosophy (was Re: Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID)))

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2012-11-03 at 10:52 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 12:58 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > My position is that the people who use Fedora and the kind of people we
> > really _want_ to use Fedora can cope with it.
> 
> Maybe the majority can maybe they can't. But as evident by this thread
> even fedora *developers* don't want to deal with such stuff.

I think some of them were rather misunderstanding my point and my
suggestion, which was my fault for phrasing my initial mail in an overly
negative way (that I didn't realize until I read it back).

> But rather get work done. Do you really think that users are that much
> different?

I don't think rolling release and getting work done are incompatible. As
I mentioned, I run Branched permanently on my desktop - so it rolls from
'pre-Alpha' state through to 'stable' state briefly and then back to
'pre-Alpha' again, on a constant loop - and I do almost all my work on
that. We could build a light rolling-release distro that was
substantially more reliable than that. Again, my fundamental point is
that we could achieve a sufficient level of reliability for Fedora's
purposes - the same level of reliability we currently achieve, which I
think the kinds of people we're talking about are happy with - on a
lighter release model than 'do a "stable release" every six months come
hell or high water' or 'three-track rolling, Debian style, with a very
slow-moving "stable" track'.

> > Remember, I'm not
> > proposing it be as bad as Rawhide; we have the whole Bodhi karma process
> > to work with. I think it's plausible to design a process where people
> > only rarely have trouble with updates, even ones that are theoretically
> > pretty messy; about the same frequency they'd have had trouble with
> > upgrading our stable releases.
> 
> That basically means you don't release anything and just release a
> huge update every six months. Don't really see what this gains us
> other then installation becoming an untested path.
> The installation process and images have to be up2date though to be
> able to deal with current hardware.

Eh? That's not what I said at all. What I said was that I think in a
well-managed rolling release model, users would actually run into
trouble only about as often as they already do anyway. I don't mean
they'd only get updates every six months, I mean they'd only get updates
which _broke stuff_ on average every six months. Or less.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net