KDE update - no testing period?

[D Canfield]

John Summerfied wrote:
> The joys of a rolling beta:-)
>
> If you don't like the way Fedora works, try RHEL or its clones such as 
> Centos, WBEL, or if you still want the latest technology try 
> Ubuntu/Kubuntu with releases each October and April with the latest, 
> and has few if any feature changes within the support life.
>
> Read the docs closely, like FC they're not for everyone.
>

This has got to be my single biggest pet peeve about Fedora right now.  
Whenever discussion of why a procedure or policy is the way it is, we 
get one of two conflicting answers.  Either, it's because things have to 
be as easy as possible for Grandma to be able to sit down and start 
using Fedora, *or* Fedora is a fast-moving collection of bleeding edge 
software, so it might break... and if you can't deal with that, go use 
Ubuntu.

While I suppose the case could be made that those two goals don't 
absolutely have to conflict, it does seem rather pointless to try to 
serve both masters.  If Fedora releases are never "stable" and always 
carry a warning label, why bother designing them to be accessible to the 
common end user?  A lot of times it really feels like nobody knows who 
is supposed to be using this distribution.

I use FC on my desktop/laptop because I believe it has made me better at 
administering my RHEL-based servers, and because of the broad support by 
3rd party packagers (I can't use RHEL on my desktop... it's just too far 
behind to be feasible most of the time).  I nearly took everyone's 
advice and switched to Ubuntu a few months ago because things just 
generally seemed to work better there, even in development.  However, I 
quickly realized just how far I'd be drifting from RHEL if I stayed 
there, so instead I decided to come back to FC for a while and see if I 
could help improve the distro that I've grown so accustomed to over the 
years.  Unfortunately, as I've been on the devel list, there really 
seems to be a lack of focus or direction in the project, and even the 
Red hat guys seem to contradict each other half the time. 

So, for now it just seems to be a lot of people working on whatever 
projects they "own" until the buzzer sounds for a test release.  Then 
after a few releases, things are finally declared stable and a release 
is made.  After which, everything continues to be updated with no 
apparent limits other than "try not to break too much stuff at once."

My goal is not to bash the project here.  I'm just saying that I for one 
am totally lost as to what direction the project is headed in, and based 
on the amount of back and forth conversation on this list, it seems a 
lot of people are in the same boat.  Is there some vast repository of 
design goal and policy documents that I'm missing somewhere?