Stabe vs. Release vs Devel Was: KDE update - no testing period?

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

D Canfield wrote:

>>
>>>   Why not take the debian methodology to the extreme and just have a 
>>> testing and core repository with no releases?   There's no interest 
>>> in getting or keeping any end users, right?
>>
>> Avoid rhetoric since it doesnt help at all.
>>
> It frustrates me that you dodged this question as "rhetoric" when it 
> is actually the question that has bothered me the most.

The rhetoric comes from questioning the interest in retaining users.

> If there are no rules or policies regarding API/ABI/Version 
> Number/Whatever stability in the releases, then really what *is* the 
> point of a release?

Point of a release is achieving a set of milestones while branching off 
into a development tree for intrusive changes which cannot be provided 
as an update in a rolling release model. These are all discussions that 
has already happened when Fedora was launched. Refer to fedora-devel 
list archives.

>   As the policies stand right now, there is nothing preventing all of 
> the FC4 packages being pushed into the FC3 tree.  Instinctively that 
> sounds ridiculous, but given the package churn in FC4 of even major 
> components like KDE, we're getting closer and closer to that.

There has been a large number of changes that is only happening during 
the development stage and not as updates.  Many of them like modular 
Xorg, SELinux reference policy or changes in the system compiler affects 
nearly all of the packages. These changes are tested in the rawhide and 
test releases and included in the subsequent release. Every release of 
Fedora has included fairly major innovative changes.


> So again I ask what the point is of a release?  What makes FC3 and FC4 
> different?  Why not just have a development tree where things are 
> developed and tested, and a stable tree where packages are then merged 
> once people are happy with them?  Then just make sure the whole thing 
> can be installed from scratch once every 3 months and stop wasting 
> resources on release management, updating multiple releases, fedora 
> legacy, etc.   It seems to me that it would be much less confusing 
> than the current non-policies for releases.

In short, rolling updates for every change is not feasible without a 
extensively large amount of QA. Even then I believe the current model of 
releases is better than trying out that.

-- 
Rahul 

Fedora Bug Triaging - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers