Who is Fedora for?

Reading the comments in the thread here, I think you'll find the Board's statement on how we believe updates should happen is exactly in keeping with (nearly all?) the comments here - fundamentally, releases are releases, and should not be getting major behavior-changing package version bumps along the way (modulo "really good reasons" of course - we're human, not mindless machines following orders).

I know this will ease the concern of many of our users, that on any given day they can't know if 'yum update' will keep them with a functional system or not. The anecdotal poor update experience stories noted in this thread should become exceptional, not standard practice.

I'm sure there will be more conversations about this, especially as the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) takes this vision statement and turns it into implementable practice. There will be bumps along the way. And yes, some contributors may not be pleased with this direction, but we feel it's worth the effort to improve our processes to keep our users productive, while continuing the traditions of rapid free and open source software development with high quality.

Thanks,
Matt Domsch
Fedora Board member