On Thu, 2006-27-04 at 15:52 -0700, John Wendel wrote: > Here's your chance to slap me up side of the head! > > Reading the Debian thread (and others) has made me wonder why Fedora > has to have "releases" at all. Why not have a continuously evolving > distribution? One would start by downloading an "installer system" > that would then use the existing mechanisms (yum, whatever) to update > itself. From this point on, why would one need "releases"? Just keep > releasing updates and new packages exactly as things are done now. > > I know there must be something wrong with this scenario; would someone > like to hit me with a clue stick. > This thread is to long too read every entry. In case nobody has mentioned it ; The reason for releases is to allow for significant changes to fundamental libraries that could break many things or require almost every package to be updated at the same time. I am not completely familiar with Debian, but other OSes use a similar development/stable branch system. You may have misread or been mislead, because most similar systems still have releases for the reasons I stated above, but the only time the releases change is when a significant change is made, and not based on a time schedule. Periodically such systems also have patch releases that fix security or stability issues and require significant package updates.
