Fedora upgrades and LTS

Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson at fxdev.com
Mon Oct 20 11:18:42 UTC 2008


What I never seen in the Fedora updates (within a release) are major 
release upgrades of packages. Example: Openoffice.org is releasing v3, 
but that will never make it into the updates of F9, (might be wrong 
here!) to get upgrades like this, one has to manually install it or 
switch to F10. This is the same for many packages and follows the Fedora 
almost bleeding edge frontline philosophy. I like beeing near the front, 
using new software, but I'm starting to get tired of upgrading every 
6month to a new release. This is because it's never flawless and ultra 
smoth to upgrade (not yet anyway) always some packages thats been 
obsolete or replaced, some functionallity thats totally different and 
needs a bit of working to upgrade. I've done it over the years, but a 
clean install often feels .. cleaner!..  and frankly it's to tiresome to 
do a clean install so you go with the upgrade (command line) ... solve 
the problems that occur and then continue to work.. This is still not 
anything for your grandma to attempt (and that is what it should be in 
the end) easy and clean! (a notification that appears, F10 is now out! 
upgrade system?) So this is something that an LTS version absolutely 
must have, new versions of software within a release and a smoth upgrade 
path. And smoth upgrades on a system that has additional software 
installed, not only a basic system setup.
Even if this isn't any news, upgrading a system has never been a ride in 
the park.. not with any os / platform other than maybe a basic install 
without additional components.

Why even have releases... F8, F9 F10  etc.. I guess freezes are good for 
making new install media. But shouldn't updates/upgrades be sufficient. 
And sometimes on the time line functionallity changes will be part of 
that updates/upgrades, called mailestones. Wouldn't this be the ultimate 
LTS distro? (It would almost be as an neverending stable version of 
rawhide)

//Jonas





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