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)))

[Jiri Eischmann]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bruno Wolff III" <bruno at wolff.to>
> To: "Kevin Fenzi" <kevin at scrye.com>
> Cc: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Saturday, November 3, 2012 7:37:45 PM
> Subject: Re: 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)))
> 
> On Sat, Nov 03, 2012 at 11:11:18 -0600,
>    Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> >
> >In any case, I think we do need to look at release cycle changes or
> >at
> >the very least Feature process revamp.
> 
> And get comments from other than developers. Marketting might have
> serious
> concerns about the loss of exposure not having releases would result
> in.

This is a very valid argument. I understand this is a devel list, so we should stay on the technical level, but if we discuss such broad changes that affect the whole project, we should also take into account other aspects.

Switching to rolling release would have a *huge* negative impact on marketing! It's releases what makes the fuzz and their announcements get beyond our current user base. We would have no release parties, no codenames. We would lose the product. I wonder what impact it would have on Fedora adoption by cloud providers. I think it's much more understandable not only for them, but also for their customers to take Fedora 17 than some monthly build.

I personally don't like the whole idea of switching to rolling release. Although I see some pros, I see a lot of cons that would outweight the pros. I've come across a few rolling release distributions (Debian Testing, Arch Linux, Gentoo,...) and I don't think they work if you want to achieve some level of stability and predictability. I rather see some changes in Rawhide so that it becomes a usable distribution that people more interested in bleeding edge can use. Because now Rawhide does not even serve testing purposes because almost no one is using it. It'd like to see its stability on the level where Fedora branched is now (it's not a smooth experience, you should expect problems, use skip-broken from time to time, but it's usable).

Jiri