On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote: >> Second, one comment described Fedora as "possibly full of breakage." I >> think the poster may be theorizing about potential future upgrades. I >> certainly hope that the comment was not made on the basis of the >> stability of test releases! > >I think a lot of that is overblown. One of the more amusing bits of >"social engineering" in the last month or so is how Red Hat has convinced >a huge number of people to run "Rawhide" by calling it Fedora Core Test, >and issuing updates through RHN. My guess is that this is the most widely >tested release of "RHL" ever. :-) Huh? How is this ANY different from ANY previous release of Red Hat Linux in any way? Red Hat Linux beta releases have ALWAYS been created from a snapshot of Rawhide. That is by definition, what a Beta is in the first place. Rawhide is the ongoing developmental head of Red Hat Linux (now Fedora Core) development, and betas (now called tests) are snapshots in time of Rawhide. Absolutely nothing has changed in this respect whatsoever, other than that hundreds and hundreds of people have for years now requested that rawhide be also available via RHN, and now we've made it also available via RHN. >And know what? Precious little has been utterly and truly >broken. In a few instances I've had to back out an update. >I've had far fewer problems in updating my laptop daily than the >guys in my office have had with Windows security updates. [Not >to say that besting Windows is any great achievement.] > >So while there will be bugs and incompatibilities in any release, I'm >feeling pretty confident that FC1 will be better than any previous ".0" >release. Well, it should be just as stable or moreso than any previous Red Hat Linux release, because we have the same engineers working on it, and we've followed the same procedures we've used for previous releases, done the same types of debugging, troubleshooting and bug fixing. "Fedora Core" to date has only been a test release (previously called betas), so to compare that with an official release such as Red Hat Linux 9 is comparing apples to oranges. The Fedora Core 1 release is what people should be reviewing once it is available, and knowing the resources and manpower that went into the development of this release, and having been a part of that, I have no reason to believe that our new OS release will be as stable, reliable, etc. or better than any previous Red Hat Linux release. However, no software is 100% perfect, and people who use any given release may not encounter any problems at all, while other users may encounter a few or even many depending on their setups and usage patterns. Like any previous release, there will be people who love it and think it's great, and there will be people who hate it and think it sucks. Any major development such as a Linux distribution knows these things from the get go, and accepts them. The age old cliche rings true: "You can please some of the people all of the time, and you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time." We do however do our best to try, and I think we do so very successfully even when a minority of people aren't happy with the end results, as there will always be people who fit that category. ;o) -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
