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

James Antill james at fedoraproject.org
Thu Dec 11 17:19:18 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-12-11 at 01:09 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.

 It's contradictory because that's the way the world works. Look at Eg.
RHEL-5 updates vs. Fedora 9 updates. Some of them have even had
basically the same code, at the beginning.
 But the RHEL-5 updates go through a 6-9+ month (depending on how you
count) window of testing, and thus. the end result is drastically
different. If the end result is actually better or worse than what is in
Fedora 10 (or even Fedora 9 testing, now) is very much a matter of
opinion, and depends on how far along the line of slow/conservative vs.
faster/liberal you actually want to be.

 There is no magic pixie dust which will turn 9+ months of work into a
few days (even assuming an equal QA resource).

>  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.

 Even if this was strictly true, which it isn't, yum allows you to do
more than either "do nothing" or "yum upgrade -y".
 However in reality packages don't neatly fit into the above boxes
equally for all users.

-- 
James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora




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