On Thursday 11 March 2010, Paul W. Frields wrote: > As noted in our previous minutes[1], the Board was tasked with > producing a vision statement for updates to Fedora stable releases. > That vision can be found here: > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stable_release_updates_vision > > This statement is the result of many Board discussions which have > taken into consideration issues raised recently in numerous other > venues such as the devel list. After considering these issues > carefully, along with other factors such as the broad user base for > which we should strive[2], the Board feels this vision will best meet > the needs of our millions of users, including our contributor base. > > The Board would like FESCo to read through this vision statement, and > use it as a basis for implementing changes that will help achieve this > vision. We look forward to working with FESCo and across the whole > Fedora Project to continue improving the Fedora distribution. So we're now getting a diktat from the half-unelected Board which appears to completely ignore the desires of the majority of our users[1], instead repeating already disproven arguments such as the following? * "End-user satisfaction with our distribution will increase" – wrong, the vast majority of our users will be unhappy with this change, see [1]. * "developers will have more time to focus on other areas in Fedora" – it's actually MORE work to maintain separate specfiles per release with backported security/bug fixes than to just sync the specfile from devel and build it for all releases. * "A six month development cycle for a release allows Fedora to integrate the latest and greatest releases from upstream projects into the 'rawhide' distribution and have that body of work available to the user base in a relatively short amount of time." – 6 months are actually a very long time. For example, I and many other users don't want to have to wait 3 months to get the current KDE (and yet that's the time between the KDE 4.4.0 release on Feb 9 and the scheduled F13 release on May 11). * "More skilled and/or intrepid users are encouraged to use Rawhide along with participating in testing of stable branches during the development and pre-release period." – It has been explained many times on the devel mailing list why this is not a viable alternative. (Rawhide also does other kind of changes which are not acceptable for a production machine, e.g. if I'm running KDE 3, I don't want to wake up tomorrow with KDE 3.96.2 (that was a heavily unstable prerelease of KDE 4.0.0 which we put into Rawhide so work on packaging 4.0.x can start, it would have been impossible to ship F9 with KDE 4 without that use of Rawhide), nor even with a "known good" KDE 4 such as 4.3.5. Such transitions are what we have releases for!). * "Stable releases should provide a consistent user experience throughout the lifecycle, and only fix bugs and security issues." – Do you really seriously suggest we should have kept F9 on KDE 4.0.x rather than upgrading it to KDE 4.1.x and later 4.2.x? Those were not bugfix-only releases, but they sure fixed MANY bugs, in addition to readding features known from KDE 3 which many users were missing. It is Fedora's very nature to often ship emerging technologies which take some time to mature, feature upgrades are often essential in those cases. [1] http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1337744 (If this doesn't make it through to f-a-b, please feel free to forward it. I'm all for transparency!) Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
