James Antill wrote:
> And, again, you are wrong.
> Rawhide and Debian unstable are both the obvious choices, Gentoo is
> still used by some I think. A little more work with a little more
> stability then gives you Debian testing and now moving to the latest
> Fedora pre-releases.
> Yes, those options are less stable than Fedora release should be ...
> but you appear to be trying to move Fedora release down to that level
> rather than help move them up.
> I've known people who want exactly what you seem to profess to want and
> use one of the above options. Why don't you?
Because that comes with some types of disruptive changes which we do not
perform in releases and which I do not advocate performing in releases.
Rolling releases like Rawhide, Debian unstable, Gentoo etc. have no set
points to do disruptive changes. So e.g. you wake up in the morning and your
system no longer boots because your kernel upgrade from yesterday enabled
libata and you had hd* hardcoded in some place. (Yes, I know that particular
change is now a done deal, but there will definitely be similar changes in
the future.)
As I have explained several times, AIUI, a stable release MUST NOT get
upgrades which "break things", e.g.:
* require manual adjustment to config files, databases etc.,
* break support for existing user data (documents, configuration, savegames
etc.),
* knowingly introduce regressions,
* remove features,
* radically change the UI (but I don't think minor changes like a menu entry
moving to a different place are a serious issue),
* bump the soname of a core library on which dozens of packages depend (but
I don't personally see a grouped update with a soname change and a rebuild
of ALL packages using that library as a problem as long as it's only for a
few packages),
* change the API of a library in a way that existing applications using it
fail to rebuild and cannot easily be fixed (in fact soname bumps MUST be
accompanied by rebuilds of everything affected)
etc. (and I think we all agree there. But that's why Rawhide is not the
answer!), but IMHO (and there opinions differ), it SHOULD get upgrades
which:
* fix bugs, even if they're not critical or security,
* introduce features in a non-disruptive, backwards-compatible way (e.g.
there's now a new menu entry which does something cool, at worst that new
menu entry might not work perfectly, but it shouldn't affect anything else).
Kevin Kofler
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