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)))

Tom Lane tgl at redhat.com
Sun Nov 4 16:05:45 UTC 2012


Simon Lukasik <isimluk at fedoraproject.org> writes:
> Currently, each Fedora release is kept alive for 13(+/-) months. There
> were dozens of threads about shortening or prolonging period -- but I am
> not sure if something like the following has been ever discussed:

> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==1 -- is alive for 7 months.
> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==2 -- is alive for 7 months.
> Each N-th Fedora release -- where N%3==0 -- is alive for 19 months.

> Additionally, maintainers might be encouraged to push their system wide
> changes into N%3==1. As well as they might be encouraged to make the
> Fedora N%3==0 their best bread.

Wouldn't that just encourage 99% of average users to ignore the
short-lived releases?  It would sure be a damn tempting approach for me.
(Personally, all I want out of Fedora is a stable platform to get my
work done on, and the less often I have to reinstall, the better.)

I think what you'd have using the short-lived releases is just the same
kind of brave souls who are willing to run rawhide or pre-release
branched systems.  And there aren't that many of them, so you'd get
little QA, which would help to ensure those releases remain buggy, thus
creating a nasty feedback loop that further helps to drive away people
whose main interest is not in helping to debug the system.  Eventually
the short-lived releases would just be rawhide-with-a-different-name.

			regards, tom lane


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