Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

[Kevin Kofler]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> As long as you are adding new features, it is always the equivalent of
> beta - pretty much by definition.

No it's not. Only features which are considered safe by their maintainers
are added.

> Except when it doesn't.  Would you bet your life on it working correctly
>   after every update?  You'd have lost several times on my machines,
> including an update very near the end of FC6's life - a point where
> there was no reason at all to be making changes likely to break things.

If an update is broken, I just revert it with rpm -Uvh --oldpackage, problem
solved. (This assumes you have the previous package still cached, but
that's what keepcache=1 in yum.conf is for. I don't understand why that's
not the default.) But this happens pretty rarely in my experience.

And what were you doing running FC6 very near the end of its life? You
should have upgraded to F7 or F8 by then. :-) The updates for old releases
get less testing because most packagers and most of the people running
updates-testing have long since moved on to a newer one by then.

> And I'm not using it again for anything that matters until I have some
> reason to think it won't be repeated.

I'm running Fedora on my machines (a desktop, a laptop and an old laptop
which I don't really use anymore because the new one is way faster) just
fine. I don't use any other OS.

        Kevin Kofler