On Friday 16 July 2004 10:38, Timothy Murphy wrote: >I've said before, and will say again - >you would get many more testers, and therefore more reliable > distributions, if it were stated that test releases should in > principle be upgrade-able. I concur with this attitude. While I do have an install of FC2, its on a very old box out in the woodshop, and doesn't get the testing it really should, besides its jurrasic aged hardware, a 233mhz p2 that was given to me by a niece. >I'm sure there must be many people like me >who would be willing to run test releases >but who don't have a spare machine to devote to this purpose, >or the time or inclination to re-install every 3 months. This is my reason also. This is my banking machine, my tv set, my sound system and general entertainment center. Its still running FC1, with a homebuilt kde, and currently running a 2.6.8-rc1-mm1 kernel. I like to stay current with kernel stuff because its dead easy to revert a disastrous change with a simple reboot. But I am not about to reinstall, and go thru the dependency hell of making everything work again every 3 months or less. Such pain is for masochists, not for old farts like me who have enough of that from the wear and tear of the accumulated 69+ years. If you want to make incremental test 1, test 2 etc releases in the form of snapshot iso's, thats fine, but at the same time, we should be able to use yum or one of the *-carpet things to bring our existing test installs to be identical, over time so that at new release date, our systems are equal, or not more than say 10 packages out of date to the new release. The current method seems to invite breakage of too many things all at once. This is one of the things that if implemented, would have me signing up for the 50 bucks a year up2date subscription, doing it the same week it was announced. I had my firewall RH7.3 machine on that schedule, and its bulletproof between power failures that outlast the ups yet today. And I don't often fix something thats not broken when its a key part of the Heskett Ranchette Network. :-) >-- >Timothy Murphy >e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie >tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 >s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland -- Cheers, Gene There are 4 boxes to be used in defense of liberty. Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order, starting now. -Ed Howdershelt, Author Additions to this message made by Gene Heskett are Copyright 2004, Maurice E. Heskett, all rights reserved.
