EOL, rolling releases, and Extras (Was Re: Fedora Extras vs. CLOSED RAWHIDE)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 22:33, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 14:52:17 -0400, Toshio <toshio at tiki-lounge.com> wrote:
> > I agree that Core shouldn't be a rolling release, but I think Extras is
> > currently very much a Rolling Release.  And it's best if it stays that
> > way.  
> 
> I think you are wrong. I think having synced time releases of Extras
> as a priority makes a lot of issues go away.
You are missing one point:

Contributors (like me) are a subset of the general user community. They
are  working _with_ stable releases (FC1 and FC2), they are not working
_on_ the _next_ release of the system itself (FC3).

I.e. they develop and test contributions with current releases, hoping
"they will survive  mass rebuilds for next release".

What you say means: Raise entry conditions for contributions to being "a
FC developer and beta-tester". That would exclude *huge* parts of the
user community (comprising me).

> Having synced Extras and Core releases.. 
That's what "mass rebuilds" and beta testing should do.

Fedora.US/Fe should rebuild every package in "Extras for FC(CURRENT)"
and notify the packagers if something goes wrong. Then release
everything that completed successfully into "Fedora Extras for
FC(Testing)".

> I very interested in making sure the development process of Fedora
> makes it easy for people to make and continue to maintain a Fedora
> livecd or a Rule based mediaset or other installable 'collections' by
> picking and choosing among Fedora Extras and Fedora Core packages to
> bundle together as a new installable collection. If Extras is not
> synced against Core releases, any sort of community maintained
> 'collection' is going to be burdened to  deal with the different
> timesscales associated with Core and Extras package development.  So
> that we can FINALLY get past these crappy 'whats in Core' debates and
> just let Core be an arbitrary set of packages with NO inherent
> distinction in the development process. Every package treated equally
> in development process itself, then distilled into collections..one
> collection being named Core.
You will not like what I am going to write now, but IMO, this
distribution model (fixed released on CDs) has outlived itself.

Linux has become fat, distributions are becoming larger (IIRC, SuSE
currently has 7 or 8 CDs of binaries), so CDs as distribution media have
become questionable.  More severe, shorter EOLs and faster update cycles
question shipping distributions on physical media as a whole.

So to me, all these "Core on how many CDs" discussions are moot, and
recall memories about times when people had complained about linux
distros "having exceeded  XX floppies"

I.e. to me the essential criteria to distinguish  "Core" from "Extras"
are/should be along the lines of "maintained/controlled by Red
Hat/volunteers", "Intersects with RHEL" etc.

Ralf