Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Les Mikesell]

Alan Cox wrote:
>> Personally I think it was a mistake for any distribution to ship the 2.6 
>> kernel before an experimental 2.7 branch was started to keep the 
> 
> There are no plans for a 2.7 kernel branch.

That's my point.  Perhaps if no distribution had shipped 2.6 until one 
was started, we would have a place for experimentation besides 
production servers. Or if not, we'd still be running something stable 
anyway.

> Kernel updates are also
> neccessary to fix stuff for people. Its a trade off - the more people's
> systems you fix the higher risk of breaking something. The people who get
> working boxes are generally happier their box works.

I still get the Centos 3.x updates that match RHEL3.

> Besides you don't *have* to update the kernel. You can keep the older
> distro kernel, or go even newer (I run the current -mm dev tree kernels
> for most stuff). You can't go back before about 2.6.12 without funnies
> but set up right you can run very old kernels with very new Fedora

In the old scheme with an odd-numbered branch for experiments, 2.2 and 
2.4 became very stable at around X.X.20.  I don't see that happening 
with 2.6.

> I have a 2.6.9 kernel on my build box - because that was the new kernel
> last time it was rebooted

Yes, with 2.6, older doesn't mean better, just different.  But where are 
your security updates?


> [root at hraefn linux-2.6.23rc3-mm1]# uptime
>  11:17:13 up 902 days, 15:44,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> 
> and apart from udev its running FC6 having been live updated from release
> to release for about 2.5 years.
> 
>> breakage away from their users - hence the bulk of my servers are still 
>> running a 2.4 kernel.  
> 
> That must be fun. I don't know many enterprise users who consider 2.4
> viable for deployment - and not just for lack of supported hardwar.

It is fun to have machines run for years with virtually no attention or 
surprises.  In fact I think that's the way it is supposed to work.  2.6 
hasn't.  I was hoping that as it reached the X.X.20 mark it might, but 
without a development branch for things like changing the disk naming 
scheme I don't really expect it.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com