Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

[Les Mikesell]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> As long as you are adding new features, it is always the equivalent of
>> beta - pretty much by definition.
> 
> No it's not. Only features which are considered safe by their maintainers
> are added.

I don't think you understand the concept of alpha/beta phases.  Alpha is 
when a developer 'thinks' something is ready.  Beta continues until this 
has been proven correct.  As far as I can tell, fedora updates _never_ 
reach the tested/proven phase and even if they did, any package set that 
has been tested together isn't repeatable on another machine because the 
repositories keep changing.

>> Except when it doesn't.  Would you bet your life on it working correctly
>>   after every update?  You'd have lost several times on my machines,
>> including an update very near the end of FC6's life - a point where
>> there was no reason at all to be making changes likely to break things.
> 
> If an update is broken, I just revert it with rpm -Uvh --oldpackage, problem
> solved. (This assumes you have the previous package still cached, but
> that's what keepcache=1 in yum.conf is for.

This was a kernel change, so the old one was there.  But, you had to be 
at the machine when it booted to fix it.  I wasn't - and don't want to 
be forced to be.

> I don't understand why that's
> not the default.) But this happens pretty rarely in my experience.

Rare isn't good enough, and it relates to the 'beta' quality.  If that 
had been tested on any similar machine before pushing the update it 
wouldn't have happened.  I just don't see the point of every having to 
deal with crap like that on a machine where I have real work - ever. 
And I don't see the point of maintaining a test machine when the updates 
aren't repeatable and keep adding new untested content during a release 
life.  There is no value in testing something that is just going to have 
new wild and crazy changes before you get any use out of the tested copy.

> And what were you doing running FC6 very near the end of its life? You
> should have upgraded to F7 or F8 by then. :-)

I'm not completely insane.  And the equivalent fedora versions that had 
previously been used for the RHEL cuts (FC1, FC3) had become fairly 
stable near their own end of life so I had at least some hope for FC6. 
Now even that is gone and I don't see a trend heading anywhere toward a 
stable version that would make a reasonable RHEL6 either.

The updates for old releases
> get less testing because most packagers and most of the people running
> updates-testing have long since moved on to a newer one by then.
> 
>> And I'm not using it again for anything that matters until I have some
>> reason to think it won't be repeated.
> 
> I'm running Fedora on my machines (a desktop, a laptop and an old laptop
> which I don't really use anymore because the new one is way faster) just
> fine. I don't use any other OS.

Good luck with that.  I hope you keep copies of your work on the spare 
machines.  Or your work isn't important enough that downtime matters. 
Also, think about how much time you spend re-installing and grooming 
fedora. I used to think that if you only had to do something to a 
machine once a year it was a good thing.  But, as soon as you manage 
more than a few hundred of them, that turns into having to deal with 
some problem every day and getting nothing else done.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com