Trends - how to save Fedora ?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

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On 11/14/2011 06:47 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> I don't agree that Fedora is going downhill -
> I've used every version I think -
> some upgrades have been easy and others have had major problems.
> But I've never had an upgrade which I found unusable
> as I find Fedora-16, for the simple reason that KMail2 doesn't work.
> I could go over to Thunderbird, certainly.
> But I find it easier to go back to Fedora-15,
> especially since I had kept it on another partition.
> 
> I found the contrast with the upgrade to Centos-6
> (which I run on 3 home servers, with Fedora on laptops)
> quite striking - not a single problem, or even difficulty,
> with the Centos-6 installations.
> 
> So please, less of the "bleeding edge" excuse.
> 
One reason the Centos upgrade went so smooth is because most of the
bugs were worked out in Fedora. Only so much can get tested by the
pool of testers running the per-release versions. There just isn't
the mix of hardware/software available as there is running the
released version.

There can also be problems introduced by the different ways of doing
an upgrade. Upgrading from 15 to 16 is a different experience then
upgrading from 14 to 16. Running pre-upgrade is also different from
doing a network upgrade or upgrading from a DVD.

While it may not be the correct way of looking at it, I picture the
testers that find bugs before the release version to be alpha
testers. I consider the people that use the release version,
especially when it is first released, to be beta testers. Fedora
users are part of the development cycle.

The thing is, not everyone will experience the same problems. I have
had some releases that had bugs on my laptop that did not show up on
my desktop, and vice-versa. So I file a bug report, or add to a bug
report, saying that the problem shows up on this hardware and
software setup, but not this other setup. Someone else says it
breaks on their setup. Then you start looking for the things in
common between the setups it does not work on, and look at those
pieces first. The more people that report the same bug, with
different setups, the more you can narrow down the bug. Hopefully,
we stomp out most of the bugs before the software hits a more
"mainstream" distribution.

Just my view on things.
Mikkel
- -- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
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