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

[Nifty Hat Mitch]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 01:53:49AM -0700, John McBride wrote:
> Daniel Stonier wrote:
> >John McBride <jmcbride at ccis.com> wrote:
> >
> >>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.
> >
....
> I suspect it is as I feared. The rules appear to have changed (fedora 
> was originally portrayed as being somewhat stable, but over time more 
> posts are saying it's not suitable for production, only experimentation 
> stuff or home use).
> 
> This is okay and all, but it leaves me in a tough spot. I'm gonna take 
> some hits for migrating a bunch of people off RH 8/9 6 mos. ago and now 
> this product appears to be marketed strictly for experimentation.


It may be true that Fedora does take some risks in package selection
that some might not like.

My take on this is to not update my 'favorite' machine to Fedora-dot-next
until after it has seen two kernel updates.

What I have observed is best illustrated by the change to cyrus-imapd
and dovecot.   Both cyrus-imapd and dovecot are worthy choices for
the replacement of the older iampd that does need updating.

However change is hard as many of us have found.  It requires that 
we learn something new that may replace something we are happy and 
feel comfortable with.

As is common with most new packages, documents do not tutor the new
user very well.  I hope the author reads these mailing lists and looks
for opportunities to improve.  For example why does
  
  man -k dovecot
 and
  info   dovecot

tell me so little? It is true that /usr/share/doc/dovecot-0.99.10.5
is full of stuff but a man page for dovecot that had keywords like
imapd, pop, pop3 that points to /usr/share/doc/dovecot* would help.

By waiting a month or two on FC.last on my favorite machine I can test
new things on my old text box as well as take advantage of the
discoveries reported in this group.

The overlap of bug-fix support for each FCn release seems to be
sufficient for what turns out to be a seventh week lazy update
strategy.


-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	/dev/dull where insight begins.