Ready for new RPM version?

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Fri Feb 27 21:35:55 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-02-27 at 16:22 -0500, seth vidal wrote:

> To be fair - no other distro revs as quickly or as much as fedora does,
> either. We tend to get new things first. That's one of Fedora's goals.

Well, not always, there are counter-examples. OK, those are broadly
exceptions and Fedora probably does, overall, do more newer stuff faster
(e.g. it went to X server 1.5 a lot faster than MDV, for one), but I
don't think it's such a huge difference that it makes it impossible to
have a basically usable dev branch. Hell, X is *usable* as long as vesa
works. I'm talking about 'usable', not 'perfect', here. Stuff still
*breaks*, in other dev branches. The point is they have a base of users
who seem perfectly able to keep using them despite the breakages, and a
wide base of developers running the dev branches.

> So, saying that other distros have an easier development branch is
> really just evidence that fedora is doing what fedora does, move
> quickly.

I'm not sure that's actually the case. :) I think it's mostly a case of
vicious and virtuous circles: Fedora has a dev branch that everyone
believes is hard, so no-one uses it, so it tends to get broken a bit
more often, so everyone believes it's hard, so...

By comparison, if you have a dev branch with a somewhat lower barrier of
entry, more people use it, the developers who use it tend to fix stuff
quickly when it gets broken (dog food principle), the wider user base
means the word gets out quickly when something's broken and you can
avoid or work around the breakage, so the dev branch gets a reputation
for being usable, so more people use it, so...

I've been running Rawhide for a few weeks now, and haven't had any major
problems. Granted, small sample size and restricted duration, but still.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net




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