long term support release

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Jan 23 18:44:25 UTC 2008


Adam Tkac wrote:
> 
> Please stop confusing people that F8 is unstable. If you have proof
> that some software in F8 is badly broken and is alpha version and
> stable release of that software is far more stable tell that sample
> here. We will tell to maintainer that this should never happen again.
> But blame something "because it is alpha" and only because alpha is very
> bad.

Perhaps you missed the "long term" in the subject of this discussion... 
Even if today's version of F8 worked perfectly (which it probably 
doesn't, considering the complaints about audio on the list and the 
changes happening in firewire support) there is nothing long-term about 
it.  One of the definitions of stable is 'unchanging' and no version of 
fedora has ever been stable in that respect.  The other has to to with 
interface stability and not crashing - and fedora does not have a good 
history with these either.  While most people probably care most about 
the latter type of stability here are reasons (like experience...) to 
expect the two concepts to be related and to expect new code to 
introduce new bugs.

But, there are also two concepts relating to support, and I'm not quite 
sure which this thread is about.  One is a stream of updates fixing the 
bugs in the code initially shipped - these are particularly important 
where security problems exist and have been made public.  In fact it is 
unreasonable to even consider running a distribution past the time when 
you can get security updates on a machine exposed to the internet. 
Currently for enterprise versions with long term support, these updates 
introduce as little change as possible to avoid new bugs and unexpected 
behavior.  However, that doesn't fit fedora's model of staying close to 
the upstream development work, so a fedora-style LTS might consist of 
building current-version replacements for anything that needs fixing and 
not involve a great deal of extra backporting effort.  The other 
'support' concept has to do with handholding and helping with individual 
user problems, which is what people really expect when they pay for free 
software.  Which are we talking about here?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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