A dream of a Red hat linux for desktop PC ?

James Wilkinson fedora at aprilcottage.co.uk
Sat Feb 24 14:37:43 UTC 2007


I wrote:
> Bugs happen. This wasn't Dave Jones' fault, though -- it was an
> installer bug. I don't see what your point is.

Wong Kwok-hon wrote:
> I meant every version have a bug when it release as I said. I didn't
> said it is Dave's fault.
> If u said that it has a QA team, why would it happened ??

Simple. You can't get all the bugs. You can get most of them. The
existence of bugs doesn't mean that QA is worthless -- it means it's
necessary.

I wrote:
> I'm getting confused here -- you want old Fedora or Red Hat releases,
> with new software. That *is* a contradiction in terms.

Wong Kwok-hon wrote:
> No, I meant the applications can also upgrade and stay in old version
> of OS not just upgrade all thing to new Fedora because it need user to
> backing up the data, re-install the OS, re-config interfaces...etc.

So you want an old OS, and new applications, on which you can do a
rolling upgrade as and when you want.

I still don't think you really want (for example) a new version of
OpenOffice to come along that's changed the default format, so suddenly
people who could read your Office documents now can't. You want to
manage such things.

In that case, you probably want to say "Is there a new version of
Firefox out?" or "Would a newer version of OpenOffice help?", then do an
update just on that package. (That's a lot closer to the Windows model.)

For those two applications, you could probably "do it yourself" based on
a CentOS stable OS and binary packages from those two sites. Things like
Gnome and KDE are harder -- they do tend to rely on new system features
precisely because people who update Gnome or KDE can also update their
systems, and because the new features are useful.

Besides, projects like Gnome can be fairly interlinked -- if you use
Gnome and you want a new version of one component, gnome has to be
upgraded, there's a new version of gtk you need, and... and suddenly few
other people have quite the setup you have. And that means that no-one
else has tested your setup -- it will probably work, but you're actually
safer upgrading everything to a known level. (This is probably much more
true for projects like Gnome and KDE than for traditional text-mode
components, which tend to have much fewer dependencies and are much more
stand-alone).

James.
-- 
E-mail:     james@ | "Minis on the other hand are just the wrong size. Too
aprilcottage.co.uk | small to work on directly and too large to put upside
                   | down on the workbench."
                   |     -- stevo at madcelt.org




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