Five basic principles for Fedora, from a server perspective.

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 12:25, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> seth vidal (skvidal at fedoraproject.org) said:
>> > 2. Avoid Churn at the Core
>> >
>> >    It may be that in order to best provide for the typical Fedora user,
>> >    frequent updates are a necessity. But Fedora should place extra emphasis
>> >    on keeping the base of the operating system from changing within a stable
>> >    release.
>> >
>> >    This makes system changes more auditable, and keeps security and
>> >    important bugfix updates from being lost in the noise. It reduces risk
>> >    from accidental new bugs or from incompatible version changes.
>>
>> Should the churn be avoided BETWEEN releases, too? Ie: f13->f14 should
>> we avoid core churn?
>
> That appears to define that there should *never* be core churn. To cherry-pick
> examples at random, that means:
>
> - we never add yum?
> - we never introduce PAM?
> - we never add sssd?
> - we never switch to udev?
> - we never switch from ipchains to iptables?
> - we never switch from ext2 to ext3 to ext4?
> - we never switch from sysklogd to rsyslog?

How many of these were done in an active release? EG did we switch
from ext2 -> ext3 in the middle of 6.1 or did we wait til 6.1 for it
to happen? Did PAM etc show up in the middle of a release cycle or at
the beginning? etc etc.

My recollection is probably wrong but I thought they were usually
major things at the beginning of a release cycle. Or if they were not
that existing systems didn't break (eg ext2 -> ext3 on a rpm -Uvh ).

That is how I took BETWEEN to mean. So glibc does not go from 2.11 ->
2.12 in the middle of a release.

On the other hand, the amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth and
great revolts of people leaving Fedora because of systemd has no where
reached the level that say PAM integration did or the libc4 -> libc5
change did.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines