| From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> | But the first question should be why a separate community is necessary. Why | is it not possible for one of fedora's goals to be to provide a clean | transition to RHEL or Centos at the end of certain development cycles I think that this idea has some merit. I'm taking this out of context to use as a jump-off point. [I'm a long-term Red Hat and Fedora user. I also use Ubuntu sometimes.] Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has seduced me with its simultaneous promises of being maintained and having a current code base. RHEL/CentOS feels too old. Concrete issues: - support for video cards - PostgreSQL 8.3 vs 8.1 Ubuntu 8.04 will be quite stale before the next LTS comes out. Probably more stale that RHEL/CentOS. It is all a matter of where each stream is in the cycle. Right now, Ubuntu LTS is ahead of RHEL/CentOS. Ubuntu LTS is in the same series as regular Ubuntu. RHEL/CentOS are not the same as Fedora. One could predict that the transition costs between Ubuntus are lower that the transition costs from RHEL/CentOS to or from Fedora. This is a disadvantage. I find the various Fedora-targeted 3rd party repositories confusing and even conflicting. This isn't healthy. I've not had this problem with Ubuntu but I'm not sure why. I like that fedora is willing to take radical steps. This is the only way to do some important experiments. Some changes make me (a conservative at heart) uncomfortable: - the idea that network connectivity is part of a session just seems bizarre to me. Network Manager may be useful but I think that this aspect does not fit in with my UNIX world-view. - the idea that non-X consoles will go bothers me. Just a few minutes ago, I used a non-X console to whack on an X problem. I hit a lot of X problems due to the way hardware gets introduced more quickly than X versions are released (and debugged). I may stop using Fedora when this change comes to pass. - Documentation that I expect is not provided. - the anatomy of the system changes more quickly than my understanding. HAL/d-bus/etc. all seem like magic to me. Why should a (source) package release be tied to a distro release? For a lot of packages, the actual minimum requirements on the environment are satisfied by earlier distro releases. The strongest argument against is to do with testing: real dependencies might diverge from declared dependencies and only testing can show this. This adds a lot of testing burden to the package maintainer. Some packages really are not independent modules. Updating such a package may require updating a lot of others. At least sometimes these binary packages are all created from a single source package. I wonder if smooth evolution (frequent uncoordinated package updates), as opposed to punctuated equilibrium (updates tied to distro releases) would work. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
