terminology and the hierarchy of releases

[Robert P. J. Day]

  ok, knowing that i'm going to embarrass myself by posting this, i'd like
to make a couple observations about the hierarchy of rpms available for
download, at least with respect to fedora.  feel free to point out where i
am big-time confused.

  as i read it from the web page

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/updates.html

i can conclude that there are four levels of rpms, in order of
stability and testing:

  1) base (the actual official release)
  2) updates (approved)
  3) proposed updates (a.k.a. updates/testing)
  4) development (cutting edge)

  now, first observation -- while numerous people refer to "rawhide",
there's no mention anywhere on that page that rawhide is in fact
equivalent to the development stuff.  perhaps a note to that effect on
that page would be useful.

  next, if i add an entry for the development repository to my yum.conf
file, from what seth wrote, i should remove entries for the updates and
testing repos, right?  does this mean that some rpm in development might
in fact be an older version of what might be found in updates?  that is,
a test release might represent backing off from an updated version in
an earlier release?  or is that hierarchy above supposed to represent
monotonically non-decreasing version numbers as i go from 1->2->3->4?
if that's true, then i should be safe leaving in the updates and testing
entries in /etc/yum.conf, no?

  finally, is it really true that the rawhide/development  rpms represent 
the basis for the next test release?  it would seem to me that anything
to be included in the next release should represent at least a minimal
amount of testing and stability, while historically, i remember rawhide
being used for really bleeding-edge, way-out-there software for which
there was absolutely no guarantee.

  IOW, if you look at development as the basis for the next release,
you'd think there should still be a category beyond even *that* --
stuff that is still so new and untested that it's not yet being
considered for the next release.  at least, not at this time.

  comments?

rday