F11 Proposal: Stabilization

[Joshua C.]

2008/11/18 James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>:
> On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 07:41 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> On 17.11.2008 23:16, Jon Masters wrote:
>>  >
>> > Various other communities (and distributions) have made a
>> > point out of "stable" releases where the "big ticket" feature is
>> > stabilization, so I think it would be a win to consider that.
>>
>> I disagree: It seems to me a lot of the current Fedora users like the
>> "latest bells and whistles" style (like you called it in the mail that
>> started this discussion) I for one really like the steady stream of
>> kernel-updates, as that greatly improves hardware support over time! On
>> OpenSuse or Ubuntu you are often forced to run the development branches
>> when you need newer driver (just like it was in the early Fedora days
>> and in the RHL days).
>
>  Indeed, and someone else wants the latest transmission and someone else
> the latest pidgin and someone else...
>  So you either need 100x distributions, or the latest stuff of
> everything.
>
>> > I would personally much
>> > prefer that stuff that used to work didn't break randomly, and that
>> > stable Fedora updates wouldn't result in me wondering whether suspend,
>> > graphics, SELinux, or some other feature that was working was going to
>> > break today. This isn't actually a rant, more pointing out a necessity.
>>
>> Agreed, but I tend to say we should work towards a solution where we can
>> ship the "latest bells and whistles" and nevertheless provide stability.
>>
>> I for one think we need something like that:
>> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-August/msg00025.html
>>
>> The relevant part:
>>
>> """
>> I more and more think 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.
>> """
>
>  Ok, the above _only_ works if you can convince all the packagers that
> they should backport fixes ... or you end up with things broken in
> "Level 2+" until a newer "fixed"¹ package manages to come up through the
> levels.
>
>  This "rolling relases" is roughly what we do with yum releases now, but
> manually and so doesn't have the backport requirements problems. So if
> we know that version 123 is pretty good but has a couple of annoying
> edge case bugs ... we don't release into Fedora 8. Although even then
> sometimes things get through.
>  If someone thinks there is something magic that can be done to make
> releases bug free, they should speak to someone involved in something
> that was released into Fedora 9 and will be in RHEL-5.3. I know there
> are a couple of packages that did that. It wasn't magic, but it sure
> wasn't anything you can easily get people to do for Fedora (IMNSHO).
>
>
> ¹ May contain other bugs.
>
> --
> James Antill <james at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora
>
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>
maybe these 2 threads should be merged:
1. F11 Proposal: Stabilization
2. Proposal - "Slow updates" repo