what is stable?

[Eli Wapniarski]

On Wednesday 28 January 2009 13:55:45 Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 January 2009 20:05:16 Anne Wilson wrote:
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu>
> > Date: 2009/1/27
> > Subject: Re: what is stable?
> > To: KDE on Fedora discussion <fedora-kde at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> >
> > Eli Wapniarski wrote:
> > > If you mean that KDE 4.3 and KDE 4.4 final will not be stable
> >
> > I think what *I* can boil-down from this conversation is varying
> > degrees, definitions, interpretations of what it means to be:
> > * usable
> > * stable
> > * releasable
> >
> > I'd welcome a conversation to be able to be able to (as much as
> > possible) clearly define what we (fedora) consider these to be, so that
> > when any such future confusion arises, we can point to the bright neon
> > sign (wiki page?) outlining such.
>
> Someone has to kick off :-)
>
> In my eyes, an application is stable if it doesn't crash or do other
> unexpected things.
>
> A distribution is stable if it has only packages that have been tried and
> tested over a very long period, which inevitably means that it will not
> have the latest and greatest, and intends making only the minimum of
> changes to stay secure.
>

I agree with Anne up to a point. Most of us are using Fedora because rapidity 
of development and the advancement of feature sets. But I do think that Fedora 
stable releases should make a rule that core backends always be marked as 
stable by the developers before they are released as stable in Fedora. Not 
Beta, Alpha, or RC. If things go bad, then where is a reasonable place to 
begin triage. It might slow things down. But I suspect only a little. The 
trick here of course is identifying core backends, not just peoples favorite 
application.

Eli

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