OS Future now that Fedora Legacy defunct

[Justin W]

Dave Ihnat wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 10:32:16AM -0500, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy wrote:
>   
>> Basically, AFAIU, you get major version upgrades. For example, FC5 has 
>> GNOME 2.14 as the main Desktop. FC6 has 2.16.
>> FC5 is not going to get 2.16. Ever. It will only get updates for minor 
>> versions.
>>     
>
> I think what he's getting at is, why do big-bang releases instead of simply
> continually releasing updates via an automatic mechanism such as yum?
>
> This model has had its proponents over the years.  Probably the biggest
> reasons you have major releases are:
>
>   o A major release gives someone new to the product line a starting point
>     that isn't horrendously out of date.  Ever have to reinstall a copy
>     of Windows XP from CD, then live through hours of updates?
>
>   
In my experience though, you *do* have to sit through hours of updates: 
the first few months of a release are so hectic with bug fixes that you 
end up downloading nearly an entire CD's worth of information in updates 
to what you just installed. I can do this because I have DSL that can 
run for hours downloading everything, but it won't work for anyone on 
dialup.

That brings me to a related question I've wondered for some time: why do 
we have to download entire packages for updates? Why can't there be an 
RPM package similar to patches? Then you'd only have to download the 
difference in a package (and I don't mean a partial file, but just whole 
files that have been updates. Most files don't get too large 
individually). I would see where this could be a problem if we didn't 
have new Fedora Core releases, but since we do, the patch RPMs would 
only have to be based off the initial package of that version release. 
If any patch RPMs are needed before a particular patch RPM could be 
installed, I don't really see why it would be a problem for the patch 
RPM's spec file to include a list of dependency patches (much like 
packages already do) and have yum automatically download them too.

Justin W
> [snip]
>
> Cheers,
> --
> 	Dave Ihnat
> 	President, DMINET Consulting, Inc.
> 	dihnat at dminet.com
>