[Fwd: Question: Will Fedora 10 Contain KDE 3.5.10 or Not?]

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 06.08.2008 15:05, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 12:27 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
 >
> The "too many updates" problem is something I've been trying to word so
> that others share my opinion that something is wrong here.  I haven't
> been able to effectively communicate what I perceive to be a problem. [...]

My 2 cent: the number of updates is not the problem. In fact lots of new 
an up2date software without being to bleeding edge (like rawhide) is 
exactly one of the things that make Fedora great imho.

Especially the kernel and driver updates that improve hardware support 
over time are fantastic. In the RHL past, the early Fedora days and in 
OpenSuse and Ubuntu these days users often have to wait half a year 
until new drivers released by kernel.org or x.org are available in a 
non-devel distro -- that really sucks if you own hardware that requires 
such a driver. And that hardware is quite common, because most of the 
time it's newly bought hardware that needs those new drivers -- and we 
all buy new hardware now and then.

But yeah, the quality of the updates could be better. One of the 
problems imho: The maintainers release new upstream versions to rawhide, 
F(current) and F(current -1) at nearly the same time. K, thx to bodhi, 
updates-testing and the push overhead there is a small delay for the 
released versions, but nevertheless a lot of updates are released to 
F(current) and F(current -1) nearly at the same time. So if that new 
release from upstream has a serious bug then chances are big that all 
our user bases or at least rawhide and -testing user will be hit by it.


I more and more think (and just like Jesse have failed to effectively 
communicate/put into words) that we should consider to switch to a more 
rolling release scheme with different usage levels. Roughly something 
like the following maybe:


Level 1 -- rawhide, similar to how it is today (a bit more stable and 
less breakage would be nice, but that's in the works already)

Level 2pre -- things that got tested in rawhide, that are still young, 
but known to work well in rawhide; similar to what updates-testing for 
F9 is today;

Level 2 -- things that worked fine for some time in 2pre; similar to 
what F9 is today

Level 3pre -- things that worked fine for some time in 2

Level 3 -- things that worked fine for some time in 2pre


Level 3pre and 3 are like F8-updates-testing and F8, but with the 
difference that everything has to be tested and shipped in level 2 (aka 
F9) first.


Just a thought and only some parts of the whole idea that jumps around 
in my head. So don't shoot me and read things into the above that are 
not written there -- it's just a rough scheme without the boring details 
worked out to show the rough concept. tia ;-)

Cu
knurd