On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 08:28, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >
> > And it probably never will. Fedora is meant to be a cutting-edge
> > testbed for RH enterprise-level distributions. This is both good and
> > bad, depending on your perspective. As others have said, if you need
> > a stable desktop environment, most likely you really should be looking
> > elsewhere.
>
> I find this often made comment - that FC is "bleeding edge" -
> utterly bizarre.
Think of it in the context of untested vs. well tested, and look
at the volume of updates made during the short FC version life
and it won't seem so bizarre. Those updates are done for a reason.
> It seems to me, on the contrary, that the Fedora team
> is extremely cautious and only takes one tiny step at a time.
FC1 -> FC2 was a very big change.
> If you want "bleeding edge" try the development repositories.
Even less tested...
> In my (very long) experience,
> Fedora is neither more nor less adventurous
> than any other distribution,
> or indeed than Redhat itself.
Then you don't understand to difference between fedora and RH
enterprise. With fedora, the goal is to be stable at the
_end_ of the distribution life cycle. That is, the purpose
is to get wide exposure and testing of the new development
included at the start of that version's life and fix the
problems that won't otherwise be found. With RHEL, the idea is
to start with stable, well tested code in the initial release
and do minimal changes over the much longer life of that version.
> There are very good reasons, in my view,
> for keeping up-to-date with Fedora,
> as many very useful developments come on line.
> (In my case, for example, the integration of bluetooth into the kernel,
> and the availability of recent bluez rpms,
> has greatly simplified my life.)
This is true - but new development brings new bugs, and hardware
related issues are only going to be found after extensive use.
> It is true that there are occasional problems with new versions
> of old applications, but that's life.
Exactly - so you don't want to run untested code in places where
those 'occasional problems' have serious consequences. If your
computer is a disposable toy, or you have a machine just for testing,
or everything you really need is backed up and you are prepared
to reinstall, you can do the testing yourself. Otherwise you'll
probably want to play the odds with well tested code.
It is somewhat unfortunate that all the software is treated the
same way in the distribution. I'd like to see a middle ground where
fairly current applications are included (since a bug there won't
normally crash the machine) along with a stable, well-tested operating
system.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
