CNET News Article

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:

>> Second, one comment described Fedora as "possibly full of breakage."   I
>> think the poster may be theorizing about potential future upgrades.  I
>> certainly hope that the comment was not made on the basis of the
>> stability of test releases!
>
>I think a lot of that is overblown.  One of the more amusing bits of
>"social engineering" in the last month or so is how Red Hat has convinced
>a huge number of people to run "Rawhide" by calling it Fedora Core Test,
>and issuing updates through RHN. My guess is that this is the most widely
>tested release of "RHL" ever. :-)

Huh?  How is this ANY different from ANY previous release of Red 
Hat Linux in any way?  Red Hat Linux beta releases have ALWAYS 
been created from a snapshot of Rawhide.  That is by definition, 
what a Beta is in the first place.

Rawhide is the ongoing developmental head of Red Hat Linux 
(now Fedora Core) development, and betas (now called tests) are 
snapshots in time of Rawhide.

Absolutely nothing has changed in this respect whatsoever, other 
than that hundreds and hundreds of people have for years now 
requested that rawhide be also available via RHN, and now we've 
made it also available via RHN.


>And know what? Precious little has been utterly and truly
>broken. In a few instances I've had to back out an update.  
>I've had far fewer problems in updating my laptop daily than the
>guys in my office have had with Windows security updates.  [Not
>to say that besting Windows is any great achievement.]
>
>So while there will be bugs and incompatibilities in any release, I'm
>feeling pretty confident that FC1 will be better than any previous ".0"
>release.

Well, it should be just as stable or moreso than any previous 
Red Hat Linux release, because we have the same engineers 
working on it, and we've followed the same procedures we've used 
for previous releases, done the same types of debugging, 
troubleshooting and bug fixing.

"Fedora Core" to date has only been a test release (previously 
called betas), so to compare that with an official release such 
as Red Hat Linux 9 is comparing apples to oranges.  The
Fedora Core 1 release is what people should be reviewing once it 
is available, and knowing the resources and manpower that went 
into the development of this release, and having been a part of 
that, I have no reason to believe that our new OS release will be 
as stable, reliable, etc. or better than any previous Red Hat 
Linux release.

However, no software is 100% perfect, and people who use any 
given release may not encounter any problems at all, while other 
users may encounter a few or even many depending on their setups 
and usage patterns.  Like any previous release, there will be 
people who love it and think it's great, and there will be people 
who hate it and think it sucks.  Any major development such as a 
Linux distribution knows these things from the get go, and 
accepts them.  The age old cliche rings true:

	"You can please some of the people all of the time, and
	you can please all of the people some of the time, but
	you can't please all of the people all of the time."

We do however do our best to try, and I think we do so very
successfully even when a minority of people aren't happy with the
end results, as there will always be people who fit that 
category.  ;o)



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat