OO,gcc,kernel: which versions?

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2005-05-20 at 17:06 +0200, Cimmo wrote:
> Jakub Jelinek ha scritto:
> 
> >Well, actually it is not 4.0.0 + cvs patches, but content
> >of gcc-4_0-rhl-branch + a few patches.
> >gcc-4_0-rhl-branch is merged from gcc-4_0-branch every few days.
> >All Fedora GCCs were like that (just replace 4_0-rhl with
> >3_2-rhl8, 3_3-rhl and 3_4-rhl in the name of branches).
> >
> >Why do you ask?
> >  
> >
> Because I want to know why a stable product will be shipped with beta 
> releases.
> Ok in this case gcc is taken from the stable and official branch, but 
> there are some patches taken from CVS isn't? So you can probably obtain 
> an unstable compiler or a compiler with new bugs, the same thing is for 
> kernel, where also snapshot are merged with redhat kernels...

If we wait for a "final" OOo, and a "final" gcc, and a "final" kernel,
and a "final" eclipse, and a "final" GNOME, we'd never ship anything.
None of these projects talk to each other and coordinate their releases,
and Fedora is on a release schedule.  If you wait for everything you
ship to be "final", you'll never ship your distribution.

If you keep older versions of programs around, while stable, you do not
get the benefits of new features.  OOo 1.1.4 was released in December,
while 2.0 had been in development for 2 years already.  If 2.0 comes out
a week after Fedora Core 4 ships, are we supposed to wait to ship OOo
2.0 until _next_ _year_, 6 or 7 months after it actually came out?  No.

You must balance the stability of software you ship with the features
the software provides.  During development, if you are working with beta
software, you identify bad bugs and you fix those before you ship.  You
don't wait for upstream to fix them because upstream is not shipping
Fedora Core and upstream frankly doesn't care about Fedora Core.  It's a
tradeoff; if you never trade something off, you never ship anything, or
you ship crap that nobody wants to use because its very old.

Furthermore, Fedora Core is a "bleeding edge" distribution.  If you want
the ultimate in stability, you use something like Red Hat Enterprise
Linux.  Different distributions fit different needs.

Dan