What is Fedora? [LWN.net]

What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 9:31 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
Parent article: What is Fedora?

I always wonder why Gentoo's way of handling this never caught on. They have the same three basic categories as everyone else - stable, unstable, experimental - and you can choose to run a stable distribution, but cherry-pick packages which interest you from unstable or experimental. You can even IIRC say that you want a specific package version from unstable, but not future versions which haven't yet entered that category, so that once the package moves back into stable your "exception" for the package will automatically go away again.

The second big thing that Gentoo does (other distributions, particularly Debian, can do the first to a greater or lesser extent) is that rather than having clearcut versions of the distribution as a whole, packages enter stable when they are deemed ready, so you always have the most up-to-date stable system you could reasonably expect.

Gentoo of course has the small matter that it is a source distribution, which rather offsets the convenience of this approach.

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What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:04 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

The last point you mention is key to Gentoo's approach. It is ok to enable users to pull in selectively from a unstable repo but this approach does not really work well for packages with complex dependencies in a binary distribution.

If you do say, yum --enablerepo=rawhide update python to grab a new version of Python, you might be practically getting the entire development repo because every python program might be rebuild for a change in the ABI. A build with paths changed to install in parallel is a workaround in some cases but not always. Cherry picking "stable" versions is also problematic for similar reasons.

What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:18 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

You are right that handling the ABI aspects would make this a major and long term project, involving a lot of upstream work. Albeit I think a worthwhile project. The autopackage people did a lot of good research into this; just a shame about their package format...

There are other aspects too - some people might have objected to an automatic upgrade e.g. from OpenOffice 2 to OpenOffice 3 when version 3 became stable, so that (the extra work of) maintaining both in parallel would make sense. This would probably be more relevant to distributions like RedHat than to Fedora though.

What is Fedora?

Posted Oct 29, 2009 10:45 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

Not necessarily, if you build the unstable packages from source. I believe dpkg can build a binary package from a source package and then install it.

If apt could have some knowledge about this, it wouldn't be hard to flag a package as from the unstable tree and let apt build it and the required dependencies from source.

I believe Arch does this

Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:51 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I think this is the concept behind Arch's rolling release model.

Gentoo

Posted Oct 29, 2009 13:49 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

"They have the same three basic categories as everyone else - stable, unstable, experimental - and you can choose to run a stable distribution, but cherry-pick packages which interest you from unstable or experimental. You can even IIRC say that you want a specific package version from unstable, but not future versions which haven't yet entered that category, so that once the package moves back into stable your "exception" for the package will automatically go away again."

I must admit I run Gentoo on my desktop at home and have a split setup running a stable core and ~amd64 (unstable) applications where I want to closely follow the bleeding edge. I think what your describing for the series is the concept of unmasking a subset of releases ("give me all 1.6.* releases stable/unstable, but don't upgrade me to 1.7.*"). I must admit it's not something I take much advantage of as if I do have problems I typically just revert the application to the last stable build.

The only package that really causes me management headache is Xorg as it is heavily split up and generally has complex dependency requirements with the rest of the system.

What is Fedora?

Posted Nov 2, 2009 9:15 UTC (Mon) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Debian, as usual, has this concept -- search for "pinning" -- but it's not as useful as it might sound, because of the dependency chains people mention. (OTOH, it works very well for pulling a few packages from unstable onto a mostly-testing box; you might pull down more than you planned, but it's all stuff that will eventually roll over into testing anyway, so you're unlikely to really destabilize your box, and eventually you'll end up back on pure testing.)

It's also quite easy to avoid those dependency chains in most cases by building an unstable source package by hand. (apt-get build-dep foo; apt-get source foo; dch --local ~blahblah.1; dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc; dpkg -i foo.deb)

Not as easy as gentoo, though :-)