Kevin Kofler wrote:
Les Mikesell wrote:
As long as you are adding new features, it is always the equivalent of
beta - pretty much by definition.
No it's not. Only features which are considered safe by their maintainers
are added.
I don't think you understand the concept of alpha/beta phases. Alpha is
when a developer 'thinks' something is ready. Beta continues until this
has been proven correct. As far as I can tell, fedora updates _never_
reach the tested/proven phase and even if they did, any package set that
has been tested together isn't repeatable on another machine because the
repositories keep changing.
Except when it doesn't. Would you bet your life on it working correctly
after every update? You'd have lost several times on my machines,
including an update very near the end of FC6's life - a point where
there was no reason at all to be making changes likely to break things.
If an update is broken, I just revert it with rpm -Uvh --oldpackage, problem
solved. (This assumes you have the previous package still cached, but
that's what keepcache=1 in yum.conf is for.
This was a kernel change, so the old one was there. But, you had to be
at the machine when it booted to fix it. I wasn't - and don't want to
be forced to be.
I don't understand why that's
not the default.) But this happens pretty rarely in my experience.
Rare isn't good enough, and it relates to the 'beta' quality. If that
had been tested on any similar machine before pushing the update it
wouldn't have happened. I just don't see the point of every having to
deal with crap like that on a machine where I have real work - ever.
And I don't see the point of maintaining a test machine when the updates
aren't repeatable and keep adding new untested content during a release
life. There is no value in testing something that is just going to have
new wild and crazy changes before you get any use out of the tested copy.
And what were you doing running FC6 very near the end of its life? You
should have upgraded to F7 or F8 by then. :-)
I'm not completely insane. And the equivalent fedora versions that had
previously been used for the RHEL cuts (FC1, FC3) had become fairly
stable near their own end of life so I had at least some hope for FC6.
Now even that is gone and I don't see a trend heading anywhere toward a
stable version that would make a reasonable RHEL6 either.
The updates for old releases
get less testing because most packagers and most of the people running
updates-testing have long since moved on to a newer one by then.
And I'm not using it again for anything that matters until I have some
reason to think it won't be repeated.
I'm running Fedora on my machines (a desktop, a laptop and an old laptop
which I don't really use anymore because the new one is way faster) just
fine. I don't use any other OS.
Good luck with that. I hope you keep copies of your work on the spare
machines. Or your work isn't important enough that downtime matters.
Also, think about how much time you spend re-installing and grooming
fedora. I used to think that if you only had to do something to a
machine once a year it was a good thing. But, as soon as you manage
more than a few hundred of them, that turns into having to deal with
some problem every day and getting nothing else done.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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