fedup for F23 and beyond

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 3:58 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at gnome.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-05-28 at 14:39 -0400, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
>> Do you think the tech could stabilize enough to obviate the first
>> reason? The 6-month workflow cadence remains a good idea, of course,
>> but  could result in a major offline upgrade, instead of  an entire
>> new distribution.
>
> I think we're already at the point where -- at least for Fedora
> Workstation (not sure about Server/Cloud), and except for
> infrastructure issues -- we can stop branding our releases with a
> version number, and simply have a particularly big offline update every
> six months. Behind-the-scenes, we still have the six-month cycle, but
> this is hidden to users. They get Fedora and it's just Fedora, not
> Fedora 21 or Fedora 22. People stop complaining about the 13-months of
> support that isn't long enough for them: we wouldn't have that short
> support window anymore, instead there is *indefinite* support so long
> as you take your monthly QAed updates pack (five small updates packs,
> then a big updates pack, then five smaller ones, then a big one, ...).
> This is the model Windows is moving to, and it makes a lot of sense to
> me.

I think that is technically possible.  I also think if it were done
without any sort of ABI/API stability kept in mind, people would be
irate.  Hiding what amounts to a major version release as an updates
pack is disingenuous at best, and will break things for users at
worst.

We cannot do what you describe without a massive amount of
re-education on what an "update" means in Fedora.  I'm kind of
surprised you even suggested this, given the focus of Workstation is
on developers (at the moment) and we're talking in another thread
about how to provided some kind of API/ABI at the platform level that
developers can depend on.  Your goal is nice, but we are nowhere near
the point of actually doing what you just said.

josh