Matthew Miller píše v Út 13. 11. 2018 v 18:36 -0500:
Hi everyone! Let's talk about something new and exciting. Since
its
first release fifteen years ago, Fedora has had a 13-month lifecycle
(give or take). That works awesomely for many cases (like, hey, we're
all here), but not for everyone. Let's talk about how we might
address
some of the users and use cases we're missing out on.
When I talk to people about this, I often get "hey, you should do LTS
or go to rolling releases.” As I've said before, on the surface
that's
a weird thing to say, since the actual user impact of those two
different things is mostly _opposite_. So, digging in, it often
really
means "I don't want the pain and fear of big OS upgrades".
We've addressed that in several ways: first, making upgrades better.
(Thanks everyone who has worked on that.) A Fedora release-to-release
update is normally not much more trouble than you might get some
random
Tuesday with a rolling release. Second, we have some things like
Fedora
Atomic Host and upcoming Fedora CoreOS and IoT which both implement a
rolling stream on top of the Fedora release base. And finally,
there's
the coming-someday plans for gating Rawhide, making that a better
proposition for people who really want to live on the edge.
But there are some good cases for a longer lifecycle. For one thing,
this has been a really big blocker for getting Fedora shipped on
hardware. Second, there are people who really could be happily
running
Fedora but since we don't check the tickbox, they don't even look at
us
seriously. I'd love to change these things. To do that, we need
something that lasts for 36-48 months.
So, what would this look like? I have some ideas, but, really, there
are many possibilities. That's what this thread is for. Let's figure
it
out. How would we structure repositories? How would we make sure
we're
not overworked? How would we balance this with getting people new
stuff
fast as well?
We've done a really good job stabilizing Fedora, but based on
observations and conversations with users I think the model has been
getting to its limit in terms of userbase. There are simply too many
deplyoments which require a different kind of stability than the
current Fedora can offer (things may not break, but they still change
and change often). That's why I think LTS is an opportunity for us to
grow.
If we want to have an LTS I think we have to give up something. It'd be
really difficult to do it on the top of the 6-month releases. An idea
I've been entertaining recently is something like this:
- unstable rolling release (Rawhide)
- stable rolling release (basically gated Rawhide with stable versions
of components) - for the early adopters who want the latest and
greatest
- LTS
It would definitely need multiple groups with different treatment:
Ring 1 - kernel+base user space, stability is the highest priority, if
any rebases, then very well tested.
Ring 2 - e.g. desktop environments, rebases allowed, but well tested
and planned, perhaps aligned with some minor releases of Fedora LTS
(.1, .2,...).
Ring 3 - rolling release components, those can be based on the stable
rolling release Fedora and shipped via Flatpak/modules... maintainers
can then only support one version for all releases of Fedora, this can
be a viable mode for most desktop apps.
Jiri