Yum and Fedora 16

[Joe Zeff]

On 02/08/2012 10:57 AM, Reindl Harald wrote:
>   i know that the release quality get more and more worse and hope
> the people resposible for that will relize this as soon as possible
> but it doe snot help screaming and running away because changes in
> fedora will hit most distributons sooner or later and mostly
> SUCH sort of troubles can be isolated easily

Fedora 15 and 16 seem to be glaring exceptions to Fedora's usual QA, 
partially because of the people who (like me) skipped 15 and went right 
from 14 to 16.

I've been giving the situation some thought, and I think that the main 
cause for all of the trouble is that Fedora made major changes to three 
different systems at the same time: going from Legacy grub to grub2, 
going from init to systemd and, for most people, going from Gnome2 to 
Gnome3.  Each of those changes has its own problems and pitfalls, and 
putting all three of them into the same Fedora version was probably a 
Bad Idea.

The change in grub was probably the most transparent for most of us 
because if we upgraded, the new grub software was installed, but not 
actually put into use; AIUI, if you use the preupgrade route, you still 
need to run grub2-install yourself or you're still using legacy grub. 
Even so, there are bound to be occasional teething troubles, no matter 
how careful the QA is.  In this case, I'm getting the impression that 
there either wasn't enough testing on older hardware or the issues found 
by such testing weren't considered worth correcting.

I don't use Gnome, so I shan't comment on it except to say that the devs 
seem to have a rather inflated idea of how much RAM their userbase tends 
to have.  As far as systemd goes, more thought should have been done 
(IMAO) on making the transition as smooth and transparent as possible. 
You shouldn't expect the average non-techy user to know how to do 
whatever's needed to find out if all of the services that were started 
at boot still are or that any services that had been explicitly disabled 
weren't re-enabled.  Yes, a professional sysadmin with dozens of servers 
to keep running can be expected to check, but the average home user with 
one Linux box isn't going to expect to need that.

I'm hoping that by the time Fedora 17 is ready, most, if not all of 
these issues will be corrected and that things will be back to normal. 
In closing, I'd just like to point out that there are very few threads 
about installation problems with F16 on the fedoraforums, especially 
when you compare it to the constant cries for help F15 generated.