alpha/beta software in Fedora 8?

[Chuck Anderson]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 04:25:35PM +0100, Adam Tkac wrote:
> I've put this software to F8 because it has nice new features. Some
> bugs is tax for them. Additionally I don't think that users use newest
> Fedora on important servers and 9.5 will come into beta stage very
> soon.

I use the newest Fedora on important servers.  They were running FC6 
before, and the EOL is approaching soon.  I'd rather upgrade once to 
F8 now rather than F7 now and then again to F8 when F9 is released.  I 
guess that was a bad decision on my part, but I've never had major 
problems on servers with the latest Fedora before.  I've been testing 
F8 as Rawhide for a while now, so I thought it was ready for my 
servers.  Unfortunately, I didn't test BIND--slap my wrist for that 
one.  Of course, who knows if I would have encountered this problem in 
a test server--it may be related to the load one puts on the server 
that would never have been seen in a test environment.

I don't mind beta software and release candidates of software in a 
stable Fedora release--heck lots of software stays in that phase for a 
long long time (ISC dhcpd for example).  But alpha software I think is 
pushing it a bit too far.  This is just my opinion, and I will work 
around whatever problems I cause for myself by using the latest Fedora 
on my important servers, but the lack of a policy on this makes it 
hard for sysadmins to choose correctly.  Now it seems that the choice 
should be "always run the previous Fedora release because the newest 
one might introduce new software that is considered alpha quality by 
upstream".

It is a fine line to walk on stability vs. new features.  Fedora is 
about being on the leading edge, sure.  But bleeding edge should be 
reserved for Rawhide and Test releases.  Especially for software as 
important as BIND and DHCP.