Michael Schwendt <mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam <at> arcor.de> writes:
*I* believe we flood our users with too many rushed/untested updates.
It
feels more and more like a rolling release
A rolling release isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is not new
software, it's unreliable software. Getting new stable software (such as
upstream bugfix releases) in is a good thing. With Fedora, you get bugfixes and
sometimes even new features very quickly, with a distribution doing security
updates only (e.g. Debian stable) or almost (e.g. RHEL/CentOS), you often have
to wait for months if not years to get a fix for your bug. Regressions are
usually less of a problem than unfixed bugs: if there's a regression, I can
rollback to the last working version, if there's an unfixed bug, there's
nothing to upgrade or downgrade to.
which is not too far away from Rawhide.
I separated out that part of the sentence because I disagree with the logic
here. Are you seeing a major X.Org X11 upgrade with some regressions in F7/F8
updates? KDE 4 RCs? A rewritten GDM? Yet all this stuff is in Rawhide.
Maintainers _know_ what kind of upgrades are not stable enough and/or change
too much to push as updates to stable releases. So, sure, the updates
are "rolling", but they're a lot more reliable than Rawhide.
The main reason I like Fedora is because the releases are stable, yet up to
date. I think we're doing a good job of separating the risky updates (->
Rawhide only) from the bugfix and/or riskless enhancement ones (-> updates).
Certainly. Look at the size of the updates repository and also
consider
the number of packages, which have superseded eachother. Those users, who
don't install a fresh Fedora release during the first two weeks, get to
see several hundred updates the first time they run an update tool.
That's a feature.
And after installing so many updates, they see regressions.
Our problem here is that updates-testing doesn't get enough actual testing, not
the updates per se. And I think the occasional regression, while annoying, is
not as bad as sitting on hundreds of bugs and leaving users with an unusable
system for months.
Plus packages that more often than necessary depend on eachother,
because
once again a "minor version update" of some library broke ABI compatibility
and requires subsequent rebuilds of other packages.
IMHO that's a non-issue.
Kevin Kofler