F11 Proposal: Stabilization

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 07:41 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> On 17.11.2008 23:16, Jon Masters wrote:
>  >
> > Various other communities (and distributions) have made a
> > point out of "stable" releases where the "big ticket" feature is
> > stabilization, so I think it would be a win to consider that.
> 
> I disagree: It seems to me a lot of the current Fedora users like the 
> "latest bells and whistles" style (like you called it in the mail that 
> started this discussion) I for one really like the steady stream of 
> kernel-updates, as that greatly improves hardware support over time! On 
> OpenSuse or Ubuntu you are often forced to run the development branches 
> when you need newer driver (just like it was in the early Fedora days 
> and in the RHL days).

 Indeed, and someone else wants the latest transmission and someone else
the latest pidgin and someone else...
 So you either need 100x distributions, or the latest stuff of
everything.

> > I would personally much
> > prefer that stuff that used to work didn't break randomly, and that
> > stable Fedora updates wouldn't result in me wondering whether suspend,
> > graphics, SELinux, or some other feature that was working was going to
> > break today. This isn't actually a rant, more pointing out a necessity.
> 
> Agreed, but I tend to say we should work towards a solution where we can 
> ship the "latest bells and whistles" and nevertheless provide stability.
> 
> I for one think we need something like that:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-August/msg00025.html
> 
> The relevant part:
> 
> """
> I more and more think that we should consider to switch to a more 
> rolling release scheme with different usage levels. Roughly something 
> like the following maybe:
> 
> 
> Level 1 -- rawhide, similar to how it is today (a bit more stable and 
> less breakage would be nice, but that's in the works already)
> 
> Level 2pre -- things that got tested in rawhide, that are still young, 
> but known to work well in rawhide; similar to what updates-testing for 
> F9 is today;
> 
> Level 2 -- things that worked fine for some time in 2pre; similar to 
> what F9 is today
> 
> Level 3pre -- things that worked fine for some time in 2
> 
> Level 3 -- things that worked fine for some time in 2pre
> 
> 
> Level 3pre and 3 are like F8-updates-testing and F8, but with the 
> difference that everything has to be tested and shipped in level 2 (aka 
> F9) first.
> """

 Ok, the above _only_ works if you can convince all the packagers that
they should backport fixes ... or you end up with things broken in
"Level 2+" until a newer "fixed"¹ package manages to come up through the
levels.

 This "rolling relases" is roughly what we do with yum releases now, but
manually and so doesn't have the backport requirements problems. So if
we know that version 123 is pretty good but has a couple of annoying
edge case bugs ... we don't release into Fedora 8. Although even then
sometimes things get through.
 If someone thinks there is something magic that can be done to make
releases bug free, they should speak to someone involved in something
that was released into Fedora 9 and will be in RHEL-5.3. I know there
are a couple of packages that did that. It wasn't magic, but it sure
wasn't anything you can easily get people to do for Fedora (IMNSHO).


¹ May contain other bugs.

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