Fedora's intended target audience?

Thomas M Steenholdt tmus at tmus.dk
Thu Jul 27 21:24:58 UTC 2006


Chris Chabot wrote:
> Following the thought of 'I am not the one who installed...'
> 
> I think we should all be running rawhide, and forget about these 'releases'
> :-)

Okay, I get the sarcasm, so let me go on to explain what i mean by the 
"I'm not the one who installed..." comment.

There are thousands of scenarios in which an update of whatever 
component breaks other stuff. The distribution should take care that an 
update does not break a component the distribution has provided.
There are just no way of handling every possible breakage caused by 
whatever the user may have installed.

How about all the weird stuff that my site admin threw in /usr/local/*? 
that stuff might break on certain updates, be it perl, bash, kernel, 
selinux or whatever. Even though it shouldn't, there is no way of 
knowing how silly those components may behave. And the Fedora 
maintainers shouldn't loose any sleep (or time) over that.
This, in my mind, is no different from people choosing to install a 
binary-only driver for whatever device. The only difference is that we 
can predict the problem this time. This gives users of said drivers the 
chance to configure yum to exclude the xorg update until the drivers are 
fixed. There is no reason at all, why the Fedora maintainers should 
delay the update because of this.

Again - I'm sure things like this are dealt with differently on other 
distributions.

/Thomas
> 
> Ps FC6 isn't so incredibly distant from FC5, so I'm pretty sure with some
> minor coaching they can be compiled on FC5
> 




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