On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 21:07, Robert Locke wrote:
> > Yet in the releases before 9, someone at RH was able to make a
> > reasonable guess at when there was enough advancement to cut a
> > point release and historically, the X.2 versions were pretty good.
> >
>
> But I think this is where your memory may be a little faulty. Each
> release, even in the old days, represented new bugs.
Oh, I remember - I had both 4.2 and 6.2 machines hacked due to
security problems, but you really have to blame that on the
upstream programming and realize that what fedora has to work
currently much better in that respect.
> Each came out in
> the roughly similar 4-6 month window. When one is "selling" a
> "product", one tries to create a perception of stability with point
> releases.
Yes, but look back at the jump between 7.3 which was a real classic
in stability and probably still running in a lot of places (I have
a few myself) and 8.0 which was just horrible.
> You know we could perpetuate this in to the last few, even, I suppose.
> One could make an argument that RHL 9 could be considered 8.1. There is
> some history that it was called 9 for "marketing reasons".
That particular one we can skip - 8.0 is best forgotten, but it was
the first of the nice-looking desktops and a necessary step.
> But I guess the point is, did you expect Red Hat, or the Fedora Project,
> to roll a new ISO every month, with updates, even in those days? I
> think what you are looking for is something geared towards "production"
> oriented environments. This is not a goal of the Fedora Project. What
> you want is RHEL.
Well, no. I don't want to wait years beteen releases that contain
application version upgrades. Fedora plus updates through the
first couple of months after release is very usable.
> But, on the other hand, since you seem very focused on having "micro-
> updates" in the form of ISOs,
Actually, I didn't expect it to be such a controversial issue. So
far no one arguing against it has come up with any advantage to
anyone in continuing to distribute known/fixed bugs. It is not that
big a deal to me because I always point new installs at a proxy server
and pull updates immediately, but most of the other people I know
who run Linux don't bother to do that. The only real problem for
me has been that for every version from RH9-FC2 I have one or more
kinds of machines that will not install due to hardware problems
(each machine will run one or more versions, but fails with at least
one - and oddly, most of them were purchased loaded with RH linux).
But, I'd rather switch than fight so I've been installing Centos 3.4
on all of those. I suspect though, that if the updates were backed
into the isos the install problems would have been fixed.
--
Les Mikesell
les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
