What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Arthur Pemberton]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:15:55 -0600, Arthur wrote:
>
>> We will have to agree to disagree on this as I found none of the
>> reasons he gave substantive. I'll wait to see what looks like may be a
>> new pace of releases play out. I will say that I find the tone of the
>> proposed changes to be overly conservative and overall unfortunate.
>> But if that's what the majority wishes, so be it.
>
> You could still run with updates-testing enabled to get many more updates
> and upgrades than with stock Fedora plus only the stable updates
> repository. Updates-testing for the bleeding edge fan-boys. The gold
> release plus stable updates for the masses.

If it comes to that, I will do so.

> At the current pace of development it's necessary to fix a Fedora gold
> release with quite a lot of bug-fixes, often even zero-day updates.
> However, (and although it can't be generalised) there is no necessity to
> replace tested components of a gold release with major upgrades without
> spending roughly the same amount of testing on them. That's what
> updates-testing is for.

Fair enough.

> Under consideration of your earlier messages, are you trying to say that
> with Fedora one cannot be productive without hundreds of updates and
> upgrades?

Not at all, that would be a bit of a backward thinking. The way I see
it is that Fedora does the most good by going this route.
Give us the new stuff early, let us cut our teeth on it, etc. Let
things come here and die or grow. I think that is one of the greater
contributions of Fedora to the community. I may be overly idealistic
however.

> Perhaps you don't know that Fedora already has a policy that protects the
> buildroots from being broken with ABI/API incompatible updates. For such
> updates it is necessary to either contact Release Engineering or push such
> updates to stable first. Recent development is that packagers run into
> that hurdle and instead of understanding it as a warning ("uh, oh, trouble
> ahead - I better don't do that") they skip updates-testing only to learn
> via the painful way that by doing it they've broken the stable distribution.
>
> Every update that skips updates-testing (or uses it only for a very short
> period) should require the maintainer to give a rationale.

That's fair.

> With all the uproar because of dbus and packagekit update mistakes, please
> don't forget that problems with Fedora are not limited to those two
> packages. Every broken dependency bears the risk of blocking a user's
> machine from seeing important updates until either the user works around
> it or the update is fixed. Every broken update bears the risk of becoming
> the annoyance that causes him to reconsider choosing Fedora. I don't think
> we want that.

Fair enough.

> And if we are unable to put updates-testing to a better effect and at
> the same time put security-fixes and major bug-fixes rather quickly
> into the stable repo, that only proves that we no longer cannot handle
> the high number of updates and their inter-package dependencies.

-- 
Fedora 9 : sulphur is good for the skin
( www.pembo13.com )