Why FC-2?

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Monday 08 March 2004 07:49 am, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm not entirely clear why it is necessary to have a new distribution.
> There doesn't seem anything very revolutionary in it,
> so why not just go on upgrading FC-1?
>

People who write software for the systems need to know what is changing and 
prepare for the changes. If a simple upgrade would do something like bring 
in SE-Linux, the 2.6 kernel, or new libraries for Gnome or KDE, then the 
software may no longer be compatible, things would break, there would be 
downtime, engineers would be called in at 2AM and other bad stuff.

Upgrades in FC-1 are almost always guaranteed to be backwards compatible. 
That means that no changes to headers or libraries in a way the disrupts 
the client programs is permissible. This makes it so that you don't have to 
recompile or rewrite everything to work with the new changes.

Whenever they are not backwards compatible, you'll see articles on the major 
Linux news sites, the Fedora home page, and on these mailing lists 
announcing in plain terms the incompatibilities.

That's why we have to get people ready for the new version and start 
trumpeting what's changing right now. We want them to upgrade at their 
leisure, sooner rather than later, but we want to give them time to get 
their software ready for the new stuff.

-- 
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner at jonathangardner.net