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Ten years of FedoraTen years of FedoraPosted Sep 23, 2013 12:50 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950)In reply to: Ten years of Fedora by whitefox Parent article: Ten years of Fedora
Isn't API up to upstream?
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Ten years of Fedora Posted Sep 23, 2013 17:18 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Seems so. If the upstream authors think that breaking APIs are fine then I don't think it's Fedora's place to do anything about it except maybe advise people what libraries not to use.
Irregardless, I love Fedora now. It's grown massively since the old 'Fedora Core' days and it is the most usable and interesting desktop platform for my purposes.
I was reminded of this last night when I booted up my old Debian testing/Unstable laptop and decided to do a apt-get dist-upgrade because it hasn't been updated in a year and a half. After about 2 hours of trying to massage apt-get and aptitude into getting back to a usable system I realized that the only thing I could do to get a usable system without a re-install is the aggressive use of apt-pinning to degrade my system to stable and then upgrade it to testing/unstable. I love Debian a lot also, but I am totally over the whole 'rolling release' thing and stable is just too old for Desktop Linux stuff. It's a great concept (rolling release), but I don't think it has much of a future.
All in all it's fantastic work that Fedora does. I have almost switched over entirely to using it for all my desktop/laptop needs.
Ten years of Fedora Posted Sep 24, 2013 0:21 UTC (Tue) by torquay (guest, #92428) [Link]
API and ABI breakage is a bug, and Fedora fixes bugs before releasing its compilation to users, no ? Fedora is in a good position to spot such breakage, whether by manual or automatic means, and submit patches upstream. Otherwise Fedora can refuse to ship an updated library until upstream fixes its API breakage. It's better to be part of the solution, rather than to continue propagating API instability throughout the Linux ecosystem. As Fedora uses "first" as a motivation, how about being the first to have a deliberate API compatibility tests for the libraries and other software it ships? Part of the work is done already: http://upstream-tracker.org
Ten years of Fedora Posted Sep 24, 2013 7:58 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Why would API and ABI breakage be a bug? I know lots of software which doesn't have an stable ABI or API. I am not aware of any software which has all the bugs fixed before release. Stuff is always released with loads of known bugs.
The first is about being first to show changes (IMO they're often not first :P). Not about first to do what you want.
You showed a site which tracks something. Then this site should link together with upstream and provide continuous integration. Putting a distribution inbetween just seems inefficient.
Releasing a perfect distribution every 6 months is IMO not possible. For Fedora I'd rather have them focus on making the installer really good, really easy to upgrade, etc. API/ABI: just focus on allowing applications bundles.
Ten years of Fedora Posted Sep 24, 2013 0:46 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If you have said A you must also say B, you know. If Fedora insist that system-level libraries and not bundled libraries should be used then it must guarantee that these libraries can actually be used—and that means they should offer ABI which is stable and dependable.
Ten years of Fedora Posted Sep 24, 2013 8:40 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
They are working on allowing both. See the many stories LWN did on this.
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