Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Nov 26, 2007 3:21 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
> I've followed Les's argument for a long time; he (and others) want kernel
> stability but not userland stability.

How about this, how about you stop attempting to interpret Les's
comments and just speak for yourself. I understand the point you are
making concerning ABI stability and you clearly understand that
upstream kernel development doesn't value it. It's absolutely not
clear to me that the lack of ABI stability is something Les really
cares about nor understands why its difficult for Fedora to provide.

>
> The CentOS and RHEL kernel, OTOH, has security patches backported but the ABI
> is fairly constant throughout the usable life.
>
> > If you can live with yesterday's kernel you can certainly live with
> > yesterday's applications.
>
> Why?  If this were true, kde-redhat's RHEL repo wouldn't need to exist.
> KDE-Redhat for RHEL exists, therefore this isn't true.

It doesn't "NEED" to exist... its "DESIRED" but you "CAN" live without
it.  It's much easier to provide a fast moving application stack as an
addon to a conservative distribution then it is to build a
distribution that is conservative and fast moving in different areas.
Whether or not there are enough resources in the community to make a
derivative distribution which treats the kernel conservatively but can
use the Fedora application stack across multiple Fedora releases
remains to be seen.

What was the point of this thread again? I've detailed where things
stand in terms of how fedora is used internally in fedora
infrastructure (which by the way uses absolutely nothing but open
source bits, no binary kernel modules or any of the things which
you've stated a ABI stability need for.)

I've not seen anything that I could legitimately take back as a way to
improve the Fedora distribution that doesn't run counter to the
inherent goals of the distribution to drive development in the
upstream projects themselves. If its come down to ABI stability in the
kernel, then we are at an impasse.  We aren't going to diverge from
upstream kernel development for the sake of a distribution specific
ABI stagnation.  We aren't going to be including any alternative
kernel builds which attempt to artificially provide that ABI
stagnation like RHEL does.  Is there a suggestion or specific complain
that I have overlooked?

-jef"Enjoys a working suspend resume in the newest fedora kernels"spaleta