On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 08:35:53 -0500,
Kamil Paral <kpa...@redhat.com> wrote:
My idea would be to have two releases:
== Fedora Stable ==
* A release for general users with low volume of security fixes and important
bug fixes.
** Bug fixes would be pushed monthly and QA would be performed on this monthly
batch of updates.
Some packages need more than bug fix updates (unless you are taking a very
broad view of what a bug is). We haven't done a very good job of having
a consistent interpretation with the current update policy. Giving the
proposal below, this will be a more important issue than it is now.
* Released every 18 months, supported for 18+2 months (2 months to give people
time to upgrade to the next Fedora Stable).
** Why 18 months? Because for general users it is annoying to upgrade every
year, but OTOH our package maintainers wouldn't probably like supporting
2-year-old packages. 18 months is still an increase from current 12 months of
support, but if we stop releasing two parallel stable releases, we can make the
support longer with the same energy spent.
We are going to take a marketing hit doing this.
** Just one stable release instead of two. Can anyone tell me a compelling
argument for having two stable releases (F16, F17) in parallel? I don't see
any. The current model probably evolved because we wanted new software fast,
but upgrading every 6 months would discourage a lot of users. Let's be honest -
yes, it will contain old packages and yes, it is intended for conservative
users. For the other group we will have Fedora Rolling.
We provide extra flexibility in letting users decide when they want to do
upgrades to stay in support. It's not only letting them use a release for
about a year if they want, but also to do the upgrade at a time where they
can conveniently deal with any issues.
* More reliable upgrades, although less convenient for power users. Instead of
current way of often-broken system upgrades, our upgrade tool would install a
clean system, remount /home, and try to install all GUI applications that the
user had manually installed in his previous system.
This seems to be independent of the proposal to have only one stable release.
This tool is still not going to be able to do magic and there will be config
things that still need to be redone. Third party repos will still be an issue.
** General user wouldn't see a difference, but we could achieve much higher
upgrade success rate.
Maybe.
** This process would also allow Anaconda devs to continuously work on the installer and
update it continuously with core system changes. Currently they can't work on Rawhide
because "Rawhide is just broken". Fedora Rolling would allow them that.
I don't think that is the issue. They work in branched because they don't
have the man power to also be working in rawhide at the same time and since
anaconda is sensitive to the version of other packages, they want to be
developing against what's going to be in the next release.
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