On Monday 08 March 2004 07:49 am, Timothy Murphy wrote: > I'm not entirely clear why it is necessary to have a new distribution. > There doesn't seem anything very revolutionary in it, > so why not just go on upgrading FC-1? > People who write software for the systems need to know what is changing and prepare for the changes. If a simple upgrade would do something like bring in SE-Linux, the 2.6 kernel, or new libraries for Gnome or KDE, then the software may no longer be compatible, things would break, there would be downtime, engineers would be called in at 2AM and other bad stuff. Upgrades in FC-1 are almost always guaranteed to be backwards compatible. That means that no changes to headers or libraries in a way the disrupts the client programs is permissible. This makes it so that you don't have to recompile or rewrite everything to work with the new changes. Whenever they are not backwards compatible, you'll see articles on the major Linux news sites, the Fedora home page, and on these mailing lists announcing in plain terms the incompatibilities. That's why we have to get people ready for the new version and start trumpeting what's changing right now. We want them to upgrade at their leisure, sooner rather than later, but we want to give them time to get their software ready for the new stuff. -- Jonathan Gardner jgardner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
