Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:41 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Who is Fedora for? by ajross
Parent article: Who is Fedora for?
Thunderbird 3 schedule was announced and Fedora included a pre-release
version based on the announced schedule and Thunderbird 3 was delivered
late but since Fedora had already tested the pre-release, it went along
with it and pushed the general release of Thunderbird 3 as an update.
Similar things have happened in Ubuntu as well, for example the last LTS
release included a pre-release version of Firefox and current release
includes a development snapshot of GRUB2. Anyone who thinks Fedora is more
experimental than before hasn't been paying attention to some of the
earlier releases.
Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:49 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)
[Link]
I still think you're missing the point. It's not the shipping of "pre-
release" versions that people are worried about; as long as things work, most
people don't care. It's the pushing of "new" versions (see the examples
above -- incompatible UI/interface/dataformat/API changes) inside of a named
release (i.e. sucked in automatically via yum update) that is troubling.
Who is Fedora for?
Posted Mar 11, 2010 19:51 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094)
[Link]
And that's what all the discussion has been about.
Who is Fedora for?
Posted Mar 11, 2010 20:02 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Then the example you picked turned out to be not representative of what you
are talking about and yes, a number of discussions have been about avoiding
the more troublesome updates.
Who is Fedora for?
Posted Mar 11, 2010 21:27 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
The differences between the Thunderbird beta and the release were large, confusing people who
were used to the UI and enabling indexing features that many people found excessively resource
hungry. While shipping a beta at GA and pushing the full version as an update may be reasonable
under various circumstances, it's unreasonable for that update to break people's workflow and the
Thunderbird 3 update should have had its defaults modified to match.
Who is Fedora for?
Posted Mar 11, 2010 21:47 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Yes and I have written extensively about that including
My point was simply that such behavior can happen in even a minor update
and we should be tackling that directly in the update policy instead of
distracting ourselves with discussions about pre-releases. Whether
something is called by upstream as alpha or beta is less important than
what changes the updates bring along. The problem in thunderbird could
have been solved simply disabling a couple of simple settings in the
initial update. *That* is where the focus should be.