Proposal: Rolling Release

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:00 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's the wrong question.  The real question is, what interface did you
> just break in an update? You don't need to know anything about anyone else's
> software.  You just need to provide working interfaces.  Or, when you
> whimsically break them in updates, give a hint about how to get a working
> version back.

Are you suggesting that we should never provide an unstable interface
in any of the libraries or scripting modules that we package?  And
that we only provide technologies that upstream has committed to API
stability between subsequent releases? Surely you aren't suggesting
that.  You can't really expect us to hold an API stable when upstream
isn't...that's just silly.

At best you could maybe hope for a subset of available technologies to
be identified as upstream interface stable, and get a subset of
maintainers to pledge to keep interfaces stable inside a release
timeframe in conjunction with those upstream projects. There is no
coherent initiative towards what could be generously termed a 'Fedora
SDK'. I've seen no interest from a group of active
maintainers..ever..to take on that problem space and commit to seeing
it happen.  Something like this would require a community member to
step forward and be a strong, active, persuasive leader on the effort.

I very much doubt that you are the right person to lead such an
effort, even if you did decide this is the issue that would finally
get you off the fence and working on something constructively.  So my
advice to you is, dial back the rhetoric and see if you can get other
people talking about this and identify the person you think can lead
this initiative.

-jef"if I only had a beowulf cluster of XO's"spaleta