Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Alan Cox]

> Personally I think it was a mistake for any distribution to ship the 2.6 
> kernel before an experimental 2.7 branch was started to keep the 

There are no plans for a 2.7 kernel branch. Kernel updates are also
neccessary to fix stuff for people. Its a trade off - the more people's
systems you fix the higher risk of breaking something. The people who get
working boxes are generally happier their box works.

Besides you don't *have* to update the kernel. You can keep the older
distro kernel, or go even newer (I run the current -mm dev tree kernels
for most stuff). You can't go back before about 2.6.12 without funnies
but set up right you can run very old kernels with very new Fedora

I have a 2.6.9 kernel on my build box - because that was the new kernel
last time it was rebooted

[root at hraefn linux-2.6.23rc3-mm1]# uptime
 11:17:13 up 902 days, 15:44,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

and apart from udev its running FC6 having been live updated from release
to release for about 2.5 years.

> breakage away from their users - hence the bulk of my servers are still 
> running a 2.4 kernel.  

That must be fun. I don't know many enterprise users who consider 2.4
viable for deployment - and not just for lack of supported hardwar.

Alan