Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Mon Dec 22 19:53:18 UTC 2008


Les Mikesell wrote:

> The version where the RHEL cut happens would track whatever happens to 
> RHEL to the point that the update repos could be repointed to Centos 
> when it appears without breakage.  If it doesn't satisfy fedora 
> developers to build towards stability even through one version out of 3 
> or 4, fedora could just start it's next version early to absorb the new 
> untested stuff.

If I understand correctly, your idea is to base a longer update cycle of 
Fedora only on versions that Red Hat itself bases Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux on. However which release it is going to be, isn't known in 
advance since RHEL release schedules aren't known in advance.

Even if it is, RHEL is not always a snapshot of some Fedora release. 
Sometimes it is earlier than a release. There is also the case of Fedora 
updates moving past RHEL like FC6 updates did.

RHEL also makes a number of configuration changes and there are 
dependency differences between them as a result.  How do you account for 
all that differences in updates? Fedora includes about 5 times more 
software packages than RHEL. What about security updates for all those 
software that is in Fedora but not in RHEL ?  That gap continues to 
increase as well since the Fedora repository continues to grow at a 
rapid rate while RHEL repository size don't grow that much.

 > But the point is that whatever RHEL does, I wish the fedora release 
 >that spawned it would do the same

What the advantage of cloning the same thing twice?

Rahul




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