On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 10:19 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
On Dec 20, 2007 10:05 AM, Michael Schwendt
<mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam(a)arcor.de> wrote:
> That's easy. The spec %changelog entry already ought to explain why the
> update is important. It's the many hundreds small/minor/unimportant
> updates which fill the updates repository and drift away from the original
> release of the distribution. It leads to a scenario where after firstboot
> you are offered so many packages that you're annoyed.
The spoken question here is... are we doing releases the 'right' way
for our target users?
Which target user audience?
As far as I am concerned (power user, developer): No, Fedora doesn't.
Is our release and updates policy inconsistent?
Yes. I feel
Fedora is applying rel-eng strategies which do not fit into
a "forward looking" distro aiming at early adoption of "leading edge
technology".
IMO, it's natural for a leading edge/early technology adopter distro to
see frequent updates. But also note that "leading edge" shouldn't mean
"instable" or "premature". Unfortunately I also feel this is what
some
people (esp. some people at RH) seem to be wanting to treat Fedora as.
If lots and lots of updates cause annoyance for fresh installed
users,
should we be making a bigger deal about point people to re-spins
as an option?
Yes. I think, there should be regular respins of the disk-images.
Just consider the current situation: The FC8 *.isos already have become
obsolete and are not really worth downloading anymore.
More generally speaking, /me thinks the concept of "gold image" has
reached its technical limits and won't lead much further.
A bit far fetching, I think, Fedora needs bootimages supporting
networked installs directly from Everything/ and some means to cut isos
to for local reuse after installation.
Also assuming we can have client
side tools which could be told to "update only package updates flagged
as security related" on a daily basis from the network, people could
grab a snapshot of the updates tree when they want to for anything
non-critical.
No, it don't think this is useful. To low-bandwith users it's
not the
number of packages, which are causing problems, it's the mass (Which
happen to originate from a handful of packages which normally are marked
security update) and from unreliability of the technology underneath
(such as mirrors out of sync, broken metadata, yum issues).
Ralf