Who is Fedora for? [LWN.net]

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 15:24 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Who is Fedora for?

Sorry Fedora folks.

It is really stupid to make major version updates to software that people have installed. Once you have a Fedora version release only do bug fixes and security fixes. Otherwise leave it alone.

If you want to provide a distro with 'adventurous' updates then you need to have a system with continous updates. That way maintainers can have the joy of doing whatever the hell they want and users can always have the latest and greatest of everything.

I would do a 'Rawhide --' (Rawhide minus minus). To were you have rawhide as the dumping ground and experimental happy fun place for developers and after packages are there to fester for a couple weeks then they are automatically sent to the user's repos.

That is to say have 1 experimental release that will act like a software repository developers can commit against and then have a unstable release that users can continously follow updates. The reason to have a delay is because it gives package developers the ability to make mistakes and gives people time to detect and fix problems before submitting them for end users to test.

Debian has had very good luck with this approach. I use Debian unstable on all my desktops and while occasional breakage is _expected_ it is not as bad as some people would think.

Plus this has the side effect of rasing the quality of your stable releases.

You can avoid the sandtrap Debian has fallen into by avoiding the 'ftpmaster' drama, making it a top priority to make it easy for people to commit new packages, and sticking to time- based releases.

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tl;dr crowd:

1. Debian has hit on gold with the Experimental ---> Unstable ---> Testing ---> Stable release cycle. Fedora only has 'Experimental' ---> 'Release'. They should have a 'unstable' that has no releases, but a continous rolling upgrade for end users to partake.

2. To avoid the pitfalls of Debian you need to make special effort to make it _trivial_ to join Fedora. Also you need to avoid the 'ftpmaster' central authority thing, and you need to stick to time-based releases.

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Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 15:35 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"It is really stupid to make major version updates to software that
people have installed."

This really depends on the nature of the software project. Sometimes
users really do want some new features as well for well justified
reasons. Refer to different proposals at

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UpdatePolicy(draft)

"They should have a 'unstable' that has no releases, but a continous
rolling upgrade for end users to partake."

That is what Rawhide is now. A permanent development branch. In case, you
didn't notice, refer to

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2...
February/000561.html

There are no plans to move from time-based releases and Fedora does not
have the concept of ftp-masters. Every package maintainer has commit and
build access and if you are "proven packager" you get commit access to
pretty much everything.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:10 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think what some people want is a package set that has the rolling quality of rawhide but an inclusion criterion more like fedora, separate from checkpointed fedora releases. As you say, rawhide is a permanent development branch; but what many people want is a permanent release candidate branch, while some want to not have fedora in general work like that. I think there are people who want: (1) the bleeding edge, for testing; (2) whatever would go into a fedora release, if a fedora release were made today; (3) whatever went into a particular fedora release, when that happened, plus security fixes. (1) and (2) are different because a particular package version will require a certain amount of testing and sometimes fixing before it would be suitable for release, even if it happened to have been put together at some point before a release came out.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:33 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Not sure what you are driving at but would a backports style repository
serve the purpose you had in mind? If not, can you point out a process
that has worked for another distribution for example?

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:41 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I don't know of a distro that does all three, but Gentoo has a bleeding-edge configuration and a rolling release candidate configuration. There aren't fixed releases at all, but users who want to avoid getting new major versions of particular packages can mask all later major versions (and inspect the list of upgrades before making them, so they can see upgrades they will want to avoid and mask them).

I think the backports style is insufficient, because what's largely missing is a configuration that is essentially backports from the version of fedora that hasn't been released to the current version (where rawhide fails on the fact that it's got tons of versions that wouldn't make it through QA into a release).

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:07 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora does have a early branching system at the moment and you can use
Fedora 13 branch and it's different from rawhide in the sense that all
updates usually go via an updates-testing repository to the base repository
and Fedora is trying to improve the quality of rawhide itself via some
automated QA tests.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AutoQA

There has been a number of ideas floating around including allowing users
to hook into updates-testing repo and provide feedback more easily. We
will see in the upcoming months some significant changes, I think.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:47 UTC (Thu) by rriggs (subscriber, #11598) [Link]

Personally, I prefer a Fedora to be short-term stable. What's the average lifespan of a Fedora release? From Alpha to EOL, we talking less than 18 months? That's not a long time to ask packagers and maintainers to maintain a package. At most you have 3 versions to maintain, and that's with a very aggressive release cycle.

I have the following options:

CentOS/RHEL: long-term stable for Servers and such.

Fedora: short-term stable for development, playing with fairly new features. Some stuff is broken (e.g. ATI OpenCL support). I run this on my desktop.

Rawhide: unstable for experimenting with bleeding edge features on machines that can be partially functional most of the time and non-functional for short periods. This I usually reserve for VMs.

I use each of these options. They all have their place. It does suck to have my email to get screwed up because of an significant upgrade to Thunderbird mid-cycle.

I really don't see a need for a midpoint between Rawhide and a short-term stable Fedora. Anyone who thinks they want this is really asking for "stable bleeding edge", and that is just oxymoronic.

I need something that I am comfortable running on as a primary OS on my desktop. With that I am able to provide valuable feedback to Red Hat and the Fedora teams. If they get too wild with Fedora, I will no longer be able to use it as a primary platform. I'll play with it from time to time. But I will no longer have the incentive to provide detailed problem reports.

Who is Fedora for?

Posted Mar 11, 2010 21:22 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I was actually suggesting that the current Fedora is not actually short-term stable (because it accepts changes that aren't security/stability fixes and breaks your Thunderbird); the current policy is actually more like something between short-term stable and rawhide, where changes that are considered production-quality but are different in ways that may matter to users are accepted. My idea was that Fedora Rolling would be managed like Fedora N is now, and Fedora N would be more conservative, where switching to KDE 4.4 within a cycle wouldn't even be considered.