long term support release

Horst H. von Brand vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl
Sun Jan 27 01:29:00 UTC 2008


Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 12:12 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > Horst H. von Brand wrote:

> > >>                                      If the latter effort fails,
> > >> you've still got a solid, working version.

> > > If you want "solid, working", why are you messing around with
> > > "bleeding-edge apps"?!

> > Why are people writing 'bleeding-edge' apps if there is no reason to use 
> > them?

> I guess no reasonable _user_ wants 'bleeding-edge'.

I consider myself "reasonable"... but sure, the evaluation comes from
awfully close ;-)

> I want/need a comprehensive, up2date distribution containing
> current/up2date (considered stable) versions of those packages I
> actually use.

To get to the point of "considered stable" somebodies must do the
"considering" (plus the attendant bug fixing)...

> As a developer, it's not a major problem for _me_ having to cope with a
> couple of issues here and there, but how do you expect "Aunt Tillie" to
> cope with them? 

Perhaps Fedora isn't for her then. There are many alternatives; in the
RH-ish range there is CentOS.

> Also, with F8 I have been confronted with so many tiny issues, which all
> together render productive use of Fedora close to impossible and have
> caused me to have doubts on the project's sanity.

Have you reported them?

[BTW, most of the F8 timeline I was running rawhide, and I was reasonably
 productive al throughout, except for some short glitches. So I don't buy
 your "close to impossible to use".]

> Interestingly, it's not the "community-maintained packages" some seem to
> preferr to accuse to be of low quality, which are causing the trouble,
> it's the sum of issues with the "standard/default packages" which are
> piling up.

Stands to reason, the "standard/default packages" are the foundation of the
system. If some obscure game or some piece of glitter malfunctions, it
isn't too nice; is the kernel, glibc, or Gnome fail it is fatal.

> >   A desktop app that crashes once in a while is not a huge problem 
> > - and wouldn't be a problem at all if there were an option to drop back 
> > to a more stable version.
> >   A machine that won't boot or a device driver 
> > that no longer talks to my hardware is.
> Yep, that's one subset amongst several sets of issues I am facing ;)

> Fortunately, these happen to be the easy cases. The really nagging ones
> are those, one can't identify the cause of.

And those get magically fixed by extending the life of a random version
with an understaffed crew doing on-and-off bug fixing and backporting? 
In my experience, they end getting fixed by moving forward.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513




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