-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Yesterday, there was a long discussion held in #fedora-advisory-board. The topic of discussion was "What is Fedora?" (Or perhaps "What should Fedora be?") I would like to make a proposal to the Board regarding this topic. First of all, I will succinctly say that I feel that Fedora should be: A stable platform for rapidly developing the next generation of free, open-source software. I know that there are several different camps on this topic. On one end of the spectrum, we have the people who want Fedora to have a longer support lifetime, to be stable out the door and be stabilized for long-time use with no changes but bugfixes made to a released version. At the other end, we have the people who feel that Fedora should be a Mecca for rapid development and deployment; that Fedora should get the newest features fastest, and people who are looking for a stable environment should look elsewhere. I don't believe that these two goals necessarily need to be at odds. My proposal is this: We should stabilize released Fedoras, while making it easy to release exciting new features as quickly as possible. To that end, I would propose the following changes to the Fedora approach. 1) We need to define and enforce a set of rules as to what changes are permissible in a released Fedora. This is going to be the hardest part, I think. It's easy to say "Major desktop environment releases are not allowed" and "No ABI changes", but where do we draw the line on other enhancements? This is a question that will have to be answered by the Board and FESCo. I also propose that the method of enforcement should be similar to that of the current critpath system: Any bug marked "Enhancement" must be given karma by a proventester in order to make it into a released Fedora. Proventesters would be expected to understand the guidelines set down as above. Failure to follow those guidelines (green-lighting a new major XFCE release, for example) would have to result in a loss of proventester status (with opportunity to reapply in the future). 2) We need a new policy regarding branching. Currently, the new and upcoming version of Fedora is branched from Rawhide at the moment that development begins on it. This needs to change. Instead of branching from Rawhide, I think Fedora N+1 should be branched from Fedora N. Rawhide should remain an exciting think-tank of in-development features, but we should always plan for Fedora N+1 to be a more stable environment. In this way, it should be first of all easy for developers to upgrade their system into Fedora Branched. Fedora Branched should relax the proventester restriction on enhancement updates mentioned above for released Fedoras. The expectation of packagers for Branched would be that it's a place to move your packages when you're ready for having real-world testing. More trust would be placed in the packagers to police themselves in Branched. I also propose that we should add features into Bodhi so that any update placed into Fedora N should also be automatically included in Fedora Branched (provided that the packages have not diverged). This way we can keep Fedora Branched as an upgrade path from Fedora N. These are my thoughts. Please give this proposal due consideration. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkxr7wkACgkQeiVVYja6o6MkkwCdG93XCYB23YhGI18blWhL5wsA c54An1BTRMeHU9Mwd5afnVGHbThOSA5M =es4h -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
