What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Les Mikesell]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
>
>>> And presumably you (and everybody else) would wait out the "until known
>>> good" period; and as nobody tried it before, get to keep the pieces of
>>> the resulting breakage...
>> If that is true, then it would mean there's nobody who wants bleeding
>> edge. That in turn would mean that Fedora should be redefined to not be
>> bleeding edge, because nobody wants it that way...
> 
> The problem is that users are asking for contradictory/impossible things:
> they want new versions as soon as possible, i.e. the day upstream releases
> them, but also updates tested for weeks.

That's only contradictory because you make it so. In the lifespan of a 
fedora package, it will exist as a barely-tested release or feature 
update, perhaps quickly followed by many updates with needed fixes, then 
aging into being mostly well-tested code. But by bundling all the 
packages together in rolling updates you make it impossible to avoid the 
  barely-tested instances on machines where you can't risk them even 
though they may only have a short lifespan.

 > Fedora currently has a good
> compromise (new versions normally get 1-2 weeks of testing, and major
> changes known to break things are only pushed to Rawhide), people who need
> something more conservative should be using a more conservative
> distribution.

Can you back that up with statistics that show your initial package 
releases to updates rarely need fixes?

> And there's also a Prisoner's Dilemma problem here: users moving to the
> conservative update stream => fewer testers for updates-testing and updates
> => more breakage => more users moving to the conservative update stream and
> the vicious circle is complete.

I think you have that completely backwards.  If I had some reason to 
think that tomorrow's update wouldn't crash my machine or lose access to 
some of my devices, I'd run fedora on a lot more machines, and I'd run 
at least one for testing things as soon as possible.  And I'd expect the 
same from others.  That is, if you can make it possible to get either 
just-released or aged/tested packages out of the repo, you'll get more 
of both kinds of users.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com