Re: KDE update - no testing period?

[John Summerfied <debian herakles homelinux org>]

D Canfield wrote:
> John Summerfied wrote:

>  From http://fedora.redhat.com/About/:
>
> "Why should I use Fedora?
> Because Fedora is the best collection of *stable* and *innovative* 
> software available in the open source world."
>
> That doesn't say to me "rolling beta" or  "...the Fedora Project is for 
> testing and evaluating new technologies. If you can't deal with that, 
> then it's not for you."

From the more recent 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#head-f4e74f5f5b3e8b494808b5b87a408de91d668d99
The operating system is Fedora Core. It comes out twice a year or so. 
It's completely free, and we're committed to keeping it that way. It's 
the best combination of stable and cutting-edge that exists in the free 
software world.

Cutting edge. Stable. Choose one.



> And that's the point I'm trying to make.  If the project is truly a 
> "rolling beta" as you put it, then why have releases at all?  And why 
> recruit users at all (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors)?  If 
> everyone is happy to make Fedora a constantly moving target, that's 
> perfectly fine.  I just think if the goals were more clearly stated and 
> understood, it would help answer a number of questions, such as the one 
> that started this thread.

Look at the way Fedora Core changes. FC's kernel went from 2.6.9 to 
2.6.12.1. KDE from 3.3 to 3.4.

That's not stability, that's potentially changing APIs mid-release, and 
that doesn't take into account the series of 2.6.11 kernels that didn't 
work for many users.

Have a look at the kernel changelog:
rpm -q --changelog kernel-2.6.12-1.1381_FC3 | less
(or whatever your latest is) and see how many are built from 
release-candidate code bases. I'm sure that Dave, Soeren, Stephen, 
Jeremy, Arjan, David and anyone I've missed tries hard to stabilise it, 
to make it reliable, but they cannot possibly do it all the time, and 
the changelog shows they don't.

Stable has more than one meaning:
1. Unchanging. If programs work today, tomorrows updates won't prevent 
them from working because of incompatible changes. Further, they won't 
change the UI, today's configuration will keep on working and so on.
2. Reliable. It works, and it keeps on working.

We don't really have either of those in Fedora, because significant new 
versions are introduced during the life of a release.

The event that provoked Alexander was just one such change.


--

Cheers
John

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