Why FC-2?

[John McBride]

Pedro Fernandes Macedo wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-08 at 12:49, 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?
> 
> 
> Nothing revolutionary?? What about kernel 2.6? SELinux? The latest
> versions from KDE and Gnome? Official XFS support ? just to name a few
> of the changes...
> 

I think his point is "why FC-2" when all of this could just be done via 
a normal yum upgrade, which is an interesting question.

I'd say the best reason for occasional full FC releases is to minimize 
the need for a massive yum update after an install.

For example downloading three ISOs to install a system, then downloading 
a GB of RPMs to upgrade it (essentially overwriting the base install) 
would be kind of ridiculous.

This doesn't even go into the problem of forcing developers to deal with 
the possibility of users upgrading from extremely old package sets, if 
you stretch the timeline out far enough. Potentially you could get into 
situations where you would have to reboot into various levels of update 
sets, to get the next update set, ad nauseum. That could get ugly.

---
John