On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 01:45:12AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote: > As I already mentioned in person when this came up in a DevConf talk, I > think that this is a plan that will likely break a lot of things, especially > the expectations all our users rely on (that everything in Everything has a > consistent guaranteed life time), and that doing away with that expectation > is going to make Fedora a lot less useful for many of our users (including > myself and probably also other contributors). Guaranteeing a life time for > the modules included in specific deliverables (spins, "editions", etc.) does > not help, because in the real world, users install many add-on packages from > our repository, its size is one of the main strengths of Fedora. Kevin, I genuinely don't understand your worry here. If Fedora had a long per-release lifetime already, and we were talking about shortening it, that'd be one thing, but I think the most common situation will actually be modules which have *longer* lifetime, and which provide continuity across base releases. There may be some software which would have shorter lifetimes, but in general that software is problematic with the Fedora lifecycle _anyway_: either we end up with major upgrades going in at arbitrary points, or we end up with unsupported versions for half of the Fedora release. Modularity might let users themselves decide which compromise they might want to take. > In fact, this change may even make me look for another distribution, and I > cannot be the only one. I cannot possibly track for each of the hundreds of > packages (not counting texlive-* because they all come from the same SRPM, > otherwise I would write "thousands" rather than "hundreds") that I have > installed when I have to manually switch to a later major version because > the maintainer arbitrarily decided to discontinue the version that I am > using. Nor do I want major versions automatically dragged in without > warning. The Fedora releases are a great point to put in major changes like > that. I agree that management of this is important. I don't think we want fragmentation down to the package level in most cases — that's why they're modules rather than just independent-lifecycle packages, after all. And, of course, a lot of this is policy decisions. For example, we could require that modules have lifecycles aligned with base release boundaries to reduce the complexity for users. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
