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

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:35:02 +0100, Kevin wrote:

> > On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:32:12 -0600, Arthur wrote:
> > 
> >> 6 months is a pretty long time to wait for a major release. I
> >> understand the rationale, but if this is going to be the new Fedora,
> >> best announce this and let  everyone know so that they can reevaluate
> >> if Fedora is for them. As things are, I feel that we are being _too_
> >> conservative. Any further move to more conservatism seriously affects
> >> Fedora's usefulness to me.
> > 
> > Why?
> 
> Because, like me, he chose Fedora *because* of the stream of updates, we
> *want* those updates, including version upgrades. 

Judging on the community uproar everytime a grave bug in updates is
discovered, I don't see that Fedora's users want so many poorly tested
updates and upgrades that throw away the work of the previous development
(Rawhide) period. I hear and read that the six months release cycle
is fast-moving enough for them and that every new release suffers from
enough bugs which requires updates to bring it into usable shape.

What I see is that although we have updates-testing repos and a karma
system in bodhi, nothing is done to build up a Fedora QA team that
controls the flow of updates into the stable repo. Why do we force our
precious users to become guinea pigs instead of only giving them the
chance to become early adaptors [by enabling updates-testing]? It's
especially the version upgrades that break the most things. Broken
dependencies are harmless compared with changes in a user-interface and
changes and in a feature-set.

"Idiot filters in bodhi"? - Not a bad idea to add a check-box where
package maintainers must acknowledge the guidelines:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/MaintainerResponsibility#Maintain_stability_for_users

> We would be using Ubuntu
> or CentOS or any of the other bazillion conservative distros otherwise.
> A distro with a 6-month release cycle, but conservative updates, already
> exists, it's called Ubuntu, why do we need to copy it? If you want Ubuntu,
> go use Ubuntu.

CentOS is not only "conservative", as a copy of RHEL and completely
different release cycle it doesn't offer any release that is close to
Fedora 8/9/10. Colin has mentioned (essential) differences between Ubuntu
and Fedora. There are more. Ubuntu won't become equal to Fedora if it
increased its updates frequency.