Re: Should we provide current/previous release links in URLs?

["Smith, Stewart via devel" <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 19, 2023, at 1:24 AM, Stephen Smoogen <ssmoogen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 16:43 Kevin Fenzi <kevin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 05:59:50PM -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> As part of the cobbler project testing, we need to test accessing Fedora
> releases with various URLs:
>
> "http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/35/Everything/x86_64/os",
> "https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-35&arch=x86_64"
> "https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-35&arch=x86_64",
>
> These need to get updated continuously as Fedora progresses.  Could we
> perhaps have a "current" and "previous" (or similar) that tracks the most
> recent and previous release?

Could we? Sure... but... there's a big can of worms around the source of
truth as to what releases are in what state. We could add yet another
thing that we have to manually update here I suppose. Not a super fan of
that.

Having done something similar in the past you find out quickly people will use such urls or current/past in configs you don’t expect. Then when Fedora moves from 36 to 37 in current you get angry complaints that 5000 systems are broken because yum update tried to move a live system from one version to another and failed in a hundred different ways. 

I was also involved in recently doing such a thing, when we switched the “latest” container image of Amazon Linux from Amazon Linux 2 (i.e. circa 2018 base of things) to Amazon Linux 2023. Looking at the metrics not too many weeks after that of what tags were being pulled showed that the majority of those relying on “latest” can actually jump from something like Amazon Linux 2 (circa 2018) to Amazon Linux 2023 without a problem.

But I’ve also seen the other side of things too often too… where people have made pretty bad assumptions about what is safe to do.

Ultimately, I’ve come up with the following “OS users deeply believe two things that are fundamentally not true. 1) That the OS vendor is flawless and never makes a mistake in releasing an update, and 2) That they are using the OS in exactly the way it is intended, and exclusively relying on things to stay constant that the OS vendor also agrees are things that will stay constant”.

_______________________________________________
devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/
List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue