yum flavors vs/ fc1, fc2, fc3...infinity

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 16 July 2004 10:38, Timothy Murphy wrote:

>I've said before, and will say again -
>you would get many more testers, and therefore more reliable
> distributions, if it were stated that test releases should in
> principle be upgrade-able.

I concur with this attitude.  While I do have an install of FC2, its 
on a very old box out in the woodshop, and doesn't get the testing it 
really should, besides its jurrasic aged hardware, a 233mhz p2 that 
was given to me by a niece.

>I'm sure there must be many people like me
>who would be willing to run test releases
>but who don't have a spare machine to devote to this purpose,
>or the time or inclination to re-install every 3 months.

This is my reason also.  This is my banking machine, my tv set, my 
sound system and general entertainment center.  Its still running 
FC1, with a homebuilt kde, and currently running a 2.6.8-rc1-mm1 
kernel.  I like to stay current with kernel stuff because its dead 
easy to revert a disastrous change with a simple reboot.  But I am 
not about to reinstall, and go thru the dependency hell of making 
everything work again every 3 months or less.  Such pain is for 
masochists, not for old farts like me who have enough of that from 
the wear and tear of the accumulated 69+ years.

If you want to make incremental test 1, test 2 etc releases in the 
form of snapshot iso's, thats fine, but at the same time, we should 
be able to use yum or one of the *-carpet things to bring our 
existing test installs to be identical, over time so that at new 
release date, our systems are equal, or not more than say 10 packages 
out of date to the new release.  The current method seems to invite 
breakage of too many things all at once.

This is one of the things that if implemented, would have me signing 
up for the 50 bucks a year up2date subscription, doing it the same 
week it was announced.  I had my firewall RH7.3 machine on that 
schedule, and its bulletproof between power failures that outlast the 
ups yet today.  And I don't often fix something thats not broken when 
its a key part of the Heskett Ranchette Network. :-)

>--
>Timothy Murphy
>e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
>tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
>s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

-- 
Cheers, Gene
There are 4 boxes to be used in defense of liberty. 
Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo.
Please use in that order, starting now.  -Ed Howdershelt, Author
Additions to this message made by Gene Heskett are Copyright 2004, 
Maurice E. Heskett, all rights reserved.