On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 05:42 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote: > Adam Williamson wrote: > > If we are - or _want to be_ - that kind of a distribution, we have to > > provide a stable update set so we can stop telling people who just want > > a distro to run Aunt Flo's desktop or their webserver or whatever on to > > run CentOS or Ubuntu instead. If, however, we really don't care about > > that kind of usage scenario and instead we want to focus only on being a > > kind of project for the prototyping of systems that will eventually > > _become_ components of that kind of generally usable operating system - > > which to my mind is more or less the status at the moment - it doesn't > > make any sense to provide a stable update set, it's not serving any real > > purpose, and it'd just be a waste of effort. > > Actually, I think our KDE updates are very much beneficial even to "Aunt > Flo" type users. We wouldn't push them out if we thought otherwise. At this point you're getting down to update theory, which is a deeply unexciting area to most people, I suspect ;) The problem with that approach is that, in the conventional approach to updates, the key factor is _continuity_. You don't change behaviour or risk regressions. If an update fixes ten bugs but changes the behaviour of some component people see every day - which is a fairly accurate description of both KDE and GNOME point releases - it's not appropriate to be an update, in this theory, because it means the updated product is breaking the expectations of the the initial release. What your frazzled sysadmin cares about most is that things work on Tuesday the same way they did on Monday - even if that just means they're broken in the same way. If you can fix something without changing the fundamental behaviour of the system, great, but that's all. As I said, I'm not arguing in favour of or against any particular position. I'm just pointing out the angles here. There is a conventional approach to updates that many distributions use, and that some types of user expect and would like in any distribution they use. We can choose not to do this, and it's fine, I just want it to be clear where the 'edges' are. Right now, if you ask around in the conventional places - Fedora forums, Linuxquestions, distrowatch, IRC, places like that - people will tell you that, if what you want is a conventional stable operating system to run your servers or whatever on, that doesn't change from day to day, don't run Fedora, run CentOS (or Ubuntu or Debian or SUSE or...whatever they like). If we're happy with that, that's great. But it is worth being aware exactly what the status quo is. It seems like our current policy is more de facto than the result of any reasoned decision. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
