Accessing A Fedora 7 Box FROM The Net

[Paul]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Mikkel 
> L. Ellertson
> Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 4:27 PM
> To: Community assistance, encouragement,and advice for using Fedora.
> Subject: Re: Accessing A Fedora 7 Box FROM The Net
> 
> Paul wrote:
> > 
> > Not everyone is such a whiz that they can just go and do an 
> in-place 
> > upgrade of any given Linux distribution. Windoze is bad enough with 
> > things breaking on an upgrade, Fedora can be a nightmare, 
> and that is 
> > on a stock distro without manually updated or installed 
> packages. This 
> > is why I personally find the Fedora policy of tossing out a 
> new distro 
> > every so often and scrapping the one to or three places back so 
> > abhorrent. Have you seen the uproar M$ has gone through 
> over retiring 
> > XP? Responsible would be keeping one version and keeping it 
> patched as 
> > long as possible, not throwing out the baby, bathwater and 
> tub every 
> > six months. There is no actual need to do this, it is just a choice 
> > made by the Fedora maintainers, to do it this way rather 
> than make the 
> > individual updates to each package, kernel included, as 
> they are brought out by the developers, and tested for use in 
> the distro.
> > 
> > - Paul
> > 
> Paul,
>  If this type of upgrade is such a problem for you, then 
> maybe Fedora is not the correct distribution for you to be 
> running. There are many distributions that are not nearly as 
> fast paced. You have many choices. I believe that most of us 
> here are happy with the release policy of Fedora.
> 
> There are more then a few people here that run more then one 
> distribution. They run something like RedHat or CentOS for 
> systems that need long term stability. They run Fedora to see 
> one direction things may take in the future.
> 
> As far as updating individual packages, there is a problem 
> with that. Too many packages depend on each other - you may 
> need to rebuild many packages in order to up update one 
> package. Then you need to test the changed package. It is not 
> nearly as easy as you make it sound. Just ask the people that 
> maintained the Fedora Legacy  project...
> 
> When it comes to MS and the problems with retiring XP, the 
> cases are not comparable. You can run a different 
> distribution of Linux instead of Fedora and do the equivalent 
> of staying with XP.
> 
> Mikkel

You make some pretty heady assumptions here, including where you assume I am
speaking on my own behalf about the process of upgrading a machine to a new
version. I in fact do run Fedora on a number of machines, but that number is
progressively decrementing. The only time I install Fedora on a box anymore
is when a client absolutely requires something that is not available in
RHEL/CentOS yet, such as the 'latest and greatest' (which too often is more
late than great) web 2.0 fluff.

The point remains, despite your arguments, that all of the dependencies
could be upgraded together at one time without changing to an entirely new
release. The Fedora legacy project is not in any way comparable, because it
was attempting to extend the life of old releases with far less resources
than were being put into developing the 'latest and greatest'.

I can agree with you on only one thing, Fedora is not suitable for (the
majority of) my needs, because I run systems that require much more
stability and reliability than Fedora can provide and don't have time to
waste on distro upgrades and fixing everything they break, often as much or
more time that would, as you say, be wasted rebuilding and testing packages
upgraded outside the "plan". Funny though, I spend significantly less time
upgrading the OS on my RYO Linux box than I have ever had to spend fixing
the problems caused by a Fedora release upgrade on any box, and I update it
far more frequently than Fedora makes releases.

- Paul