On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 3:39 PM Owen Taylor <otaylor(a)redhat.com> wrote:
One of the key parts of making a decision to delay/skip F31 is
figuring out, ahead of the decision, what the expected experience is
for users and packagers. Does F30 have normal stability, or do we try
to keep users happy by moving things forward with ad-hoc updates and
cross-our-fingers and hope nothing breaks?
I tend to think about this in terms of GNOME - would we rebase to
GNOME 3.34 in the middle of F30 or not? But there's a lot of other
pieces of software where similar considerations apply: container
tools, cockpit, NetworkManager, etc.
This is basically the problem I have with the work we're doing in IoT.
The basically will make me re-evaluate if IoT is now worth doing at
all in Fedora or whether I am now better off focusing my efforts
elsewhere.
Going back to the F-20/F21 cycle we had major issues with the year gap
in releases for ARM64. We were waiting on toolchain enhancements that
landed about around a week (exact time-frames allude me) after Fedora
20 branched, which meant ultimately we had to wait 18 months from
branch to a stable release for end users to actually be able to
consume these enhancements, there was another one, I don't remember
exact component details, that due to upstream timing as well basically
meant it was longer than that more than that to consume. For reference
Fedora 20 branched on 2013-08-20 [1] and Fedora 21 was released on
2014-12-09.
From an IoT perspective where we're looking at some features around
security that could be cross component dependent
(toolchain/kernel/userspace) to be unable to consume for possibly an
18 month window, yes we rebase kernels but we need to rebase other
components and build against those, in a stable release is a complete
and utter disaster. Unfortunately this is not a problem that
modularity is capable of solving and IoT doesn't have the cycles to
even begin to consider dealing with that at the lower levels. Sure, it
would be fine for IoT app stacks, such as noodejs, in a container but
not below that.
Peter
[1]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/Schedule
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)#Releases