Re: Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)

Posted Apr 24, 2009 17:39 UTC (Fri) by nevyn (guest, #33129)
In reply to: Re: Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons) by malor
Parent article: Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)

Ahh, ok, I see what you were trying to say. So I'll just mildly disagree :)

For instance taking today as a baseline you have (saying this entirely as myself, I do not speak for anyone, etc. etc.):

RHEL-2.1: Basically in high security errata only mode (for another couple of years, or so, I think)
RHEL-3: Needs to be "significant" secrutiy/bug
RHEL-4: Some new HW/etc. stuff makes it, basically between 3 and 5.
RHEL-5: Stable, but still gets significant changes (no new python, but new firefox, lots of kernel backports, etc. etc.). This will probably change significantly after 5.4, as RHEL-6 will be the new "head".
Fedora-9: Not as many updates anymore, goes EOL in a few months
Fedora-10: Still getting "firehose" updates anymore, slowing down now that F-11 is soon
Fedora-11-beta: Still beta for a bit, will be getting "firehose" updates for over 6 months (assuming historical Fedora norms.). But even at this point it's more stable than testing, IMO.
Fedora-rawhide: Aka. debian unstable, will probably be "unusable" for the next couple of months now that F-11 has forked and then slowly works toward "testing" as F-12 nears.

Now, from what I've seen of debian it has the changes of maybe RHEL-4 (but was branched at a newer point in time). So saying that with the RHEL/Fedora combination you just have a choice of either RHEL-4 or Fedora rawhide is not true.

Now Ubuntu seems to be much closer to the old RHL model, which is closer to the change level of Fedora-9 but for it's entire lifetime (but probably not directly comparable). And I think that is a nice advantage, in some ways, but if it's economically viable I'm less sure about.

For sure people complain about both the lack of change in even RHEL-5 and the "firehose" of updates in Fedora-10, but almost none of those people are willing to pay money/time to change the available options.

Re: Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)

Posted Apr 24, 2009 19:31 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Thanks for the excellent reply, and sorry for the confusing wording in my original post.

I hadn't realized that the continuum was so broad; that's what I get for not tracking RH for so long. It looks like my analogy was, indeed, over-simplified.

From your explanation, I'd say Debian Stable is probably a little behind RHEL5 for content, but has an update policy similar to RHEL3 -- they don't change anything unless it's security- or stability-related. Testing is somewhere between F9 and F10, and Unstable is somewhere between F10 and F11. The nice thing about using Testing is that it becomes Stable like magic, as long as you track by name ('lenny', say, instead of 'testing').

The great-something-grandparent post was pointing out that this same feature applies in Ubuntu -- you can move to a less stable release if you need extra features, and then end up back at a good level of stability before too long, with minimal effort, just by running your updates regularly. The 'granularity', as it were, is very good. It's a nice setup, at least in theory, but it really doesn't sound like others are terribly impressed with their release quality.