Release cycle

[Michael Schwendt]

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On Sun, 03 Aug 2003 18:09:14 +0200, Maynard Kuona wrote:

> I have been doing some thinking about Redhat's (And mandrake and SuSE)
> release cycles. It was especially with reference to projects such as
> Fedora, which aim to provide high quality third party packages for
> Redhat. Are these not being stifled by the release cycles. If these
> projects are going to make a commitment to quality, the short release
> cycles shall surely hurt them.

Everything's a question of how much man power is available. And then
there are different levels of quality. Packaging software into RPM
and making sure each package builds and installs fine is one thing.
Enhancing packages (with initscripts, default configs, fixes) and
making sure the packages integrate smoothly into Red Hat Linux is
another thing. An additional level of quality assurance would be to
test-drive the packages extensively. Since Fedora Linux is a
community project, all that can be done only if there are enough
people who help. This includes users who report bugs, of course.

> After a while, you can imagine that they
> will begin to ignore older releases, and leaving some people with the
> option to either upgrade (Not usually a great option) or remain outdated
> and without a source of decent third party packages.

If none of the packagers and neither contributors find the time and
or resources to test packages on the older distributions, it is clear
that support for the old distributions is phased out.

Besides major resource problems, the biggest problem with distributions
getting out-of-date is, that new software releases no longer build
unless you would upgrade core packages. As soon as you touch core
packages, however, it becomes a major effort to verify and upgrade a
whole chain of dependencies. That would be like duplicating Red Hat's
work. The user could as well upgrade the entire distribution.

> Is Redhat working with these efforts in any direct way through maybe
> hardware purchases, paying people to actually package some of the
> software etc. I imagine this could be a chance for Redhat to actually
> shed some of its responsibility to provide these packages, and have this
> volunteer effort actually become the "official: third party source for
> packages and updates.

One thing for sure, there exist common goals and opportunities. But
I seriously think it is way to early for both Fedora and the Red Hat
Linux Project to discuss something like this on a rhl-beta list. We
should all wait and see what Red Hat has in the queue with regard to
their more open development model.

> But most importantly, how does the release schedule affect a project
> like Fedora. Maybe I just need to understand.

Currently, Fedora does not do any releases, but keeps the repository
updated fluently. The repository for the "Severn" beta is filled as
problems are fixed or new packages are made available. It is not
expected that the final version of Cambridge will differ much from
the last beta version. So, all that can be done by Fedora is 
preparing and testing packages for the next release by keeping them
in sync with the beta versions and/or Raw Hide.

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