Boxed version of Fedora

[Ian Weller]

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
> This is very interesting indeed, and I was chatting about this very 
> issue with a friend not so long ago. We both have been Red Hat users 
> since a long time (me from RHL 5.0 and he from 6.0). While indeed a 
> retail model wouldn't completely suit Fedora, especially when there is a 
> Fedora release every 6 months, what we thought could be a possible 
> solution was to retail Fedora every other release. Usually the Spring 
> release is an odd number release (like forth coming 9), and Fall 
> releases are even numbers (for instance, last November's Fedora 8), so 
> why not focus either of these releases as the retail release? That would 
> mean that a new retail version would be out every ~12 months instead of 
> every 6 months, avoiding the management nightmare that a semestral 
> release would be.

I know a lot of people who only use even releases; I used to plan on
that until I became a package maintainer.  Doing only even releases
makes sense, and you could then let people know how to use yum to update
their release if they really wanted to [1].  The instructions on the
website don't always work for everyone though -- I know it took me a few
tries to get it right.  SELinux gets in the way quite a bit too, and
we'd probably have to really test it, especially with package names
sometimes getting changed.

In my experience, it usually crashed about midway through the actual
installation, mostly due to what seemed like a lot of SELinux audit
messages being printed to the console.  Dependencies resolved just fine
though.

Of course, the yum upgrade process might just be an afterthought to all
of this.  I'd love to see Fedora packaged... maybe if we can get some
more consensus on this we can see F10 be the first packaged version.

-- ian

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq