How about major and minor releases

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 10:36, Maynard Kuona wrote:
> Something like Fedora makes a major release every 12 months, and then
> a minor update release between major releases. The minor release, like
> a release 2, would be just release 1 with all the security updates and
> other necessary updates would be binary compatible with the previous,
> like a target of 99.9% compatibility, and the major could have a much
> lower target, like maybe 95%. In short, the releases cycle could be
> something like

We don't have binary compat as a requirement for Fedora, the reason is
to avoid problems like the Python 1.x thing and ensure we can move
forward with upstream projects.

Of course a lot of upstream projects preserve binary compat upstream,
using techniques like parallel install (http://ometer.com/parallel.html)
which is what Python should have done and thus avoided the whole
problem. ;-) When upstream projects take these measures we will inherit
them in Fedora, e.g. Fedora won't be breaking GNOME or KDE bin compat
since those projects have policies in place.

Not to say we need to break bin compat just for the heck of it, and
changing ABI has to be managed sanely to avoid breaking the devel tree
for weeks, but it's not a requirement between releases to remain bin
compat.

> I think it would be nice to see the introduction of the stock kernel
> as part of the distro. Since Fedora is unsupported anyway, this
> shouldn’t be too much of a problem. A contrib kernel section for
> kernels would be nice. 

I believe both of these are in the plans. Fedora Alternatives can have
any kind of kernel somebody wants to maintain in there, as long as they
stick to the basic project guidelines and standards.

Havoc