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

Nicolas Mailhot nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net
Thu Dec 11 18:47:32 UTC 2008


Le jeudi 11 décembre 2008 à 09:26 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi a écrit :

> For instance, I'm packaging a project that does one-month time based
> releases.  These releases can have new features and speed improvements.
> They also have bugfixes.  They also have new on-disk formats.  The
> project is a (python) library and commandline tool.  The library API can
> change incompatibly with new releases.
> 
> So we have two bad choices here.  In the course of a released Fedora's
> life, there are roughly twelve updates from upstream.  If those fix
> major bugs or add a new on-disk formats I pretty much have to update
> otherwise our end-users suffer (from not being able to communicate with
> people using Ubuntu, Debian, or upstream).  If they change API
> incompatibly then I'm possibly breaking third-party tools.

I'm packaging a project that does monthly releases too (or did, it
slowed down a little). Each new release brings bug fixes and features
part of our userbase cares about. Anyone not having the latest features
may have problems communicating with someone who does. Some releases
have made changes that made people complain in the past. This package is
in the default install set and should be installed on 90%+ of our
userbase.

And you know what? I don't push updates to stable releases. I haven't
for a long time. Users can wait a little. The world does not end.

Just say *NO* to systematic stable pushes. It's easy. It does not hurt.
It makes users, releng, doc, and QA happy with you. It gives you more
time to work on better versions of your next packages. It helps upstream
plan when a release need to be stable for Fedora or not.

6 months is really nothing except for update junkies. And update junkies
will be happier with rawhide anyway.

Anything but a major bug fix or initial import has no place in Fedora
updates. Other stuff helps very advanced users who can manage update
breakage and hurts pretty much everyone else.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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