yum flavors vs/ fc1, fc2, fc3...infinity

[Daniel Stonier]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 19:38:45 -0700, John McBride <jmcbride at ccis.com> wrote:

> Just curious...what is the rationale of forcing new installs every 6  
> mos. as opposed to having some type of "yum flavoring" like  
> debian...unstable, testing, stable type of thing? Then just have  
> "fedora" and a "fresh" set of cd's (requiring less download for update  
> than an older set).
>
> The reason I ask is more and more people seem to be saying "fedora is  
> the equivalent of debian unstable"...but it seems to me that fedora was  
> portrayed as a usable desktop/server system when the project was started.
>
> If this is not considered "reasonably stable software" and the only  
> choice is RHEL, well, I don't like it. I think that's an awfully large  
> gap to fill.
>
> My personal experience is (having used at least three distros for months  
> or years apiece) fedora seems to be pretty usable and likable. Just not  
> sure I like the "wipe and reinstall" every six months.
>
> I'm sure your opinion may differ...not that it takes that long to wipe  
> and reinstall, but redoing all the NIS, samba, cvs, dhcpd, etc. every  
> six months is probably a drag on admins.

Im certainly not sure of all the details, but I imagine a seamlessly  
working
updatable is a big step to run flawlessly. Maybe there's issues with  
getting
this working. Upgrading from one version of rh distro to the next has never
been always free of problems. Still, I agree - this sort of setup would be  
nice
but would take man hours away from developing a testing distro which is I
think Fedora's main goal.

There's also the philosophy of keeping up with the Jones'. I'm not really
fussed on upgrading every six months, but is there a need? For some people
probably, but I started with rh7.3 and rh8.0 which came out a couple of  
weeks
later. Once I'd customised that and learned how to samba, nat, apache,  
iptables etc
I didn't have any real need to upgrade to rh9.0 - I was happy with it the  
way it was. The
couple of applications I did need to upgrade usually weren't very  
difficult to do
manually. I skipped to FC1 at the start of this year when my motherboard  
bombed
and must admit I do like it, but now that I have it happily chugging along  
I dont think
I'll install again till FC3 - except perhaps for a poke around in FC2 for  
interest sake.

Cheers,
Daniel.

-- 
email:snorri_dj at operamail.com
http://members.optusnet.com.au/stonierd/