Tim wrote:
On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 20:41 -0400, Jim Cornette wrote:
In order to advance progress for the releases a short life cycle is
needed to ensure programs do not remain static and outdated.
I do not agree. Programs can advance and change, without the OS having
to change. OS and applications are separate things.
Maybe each final release should follow the no changes to the OS and only
upgrade applications except for security updates for the OS. That would
be a good experiment to see how well it goes. Then rawhide could be
where OS advancements are handled beforete next release cycle.
Some of the refined programs that change just for the sake of change
are annoying but overall the short cycles are just fine if you want
some reprieve from the development cycle. You have about a year for
each release support expires which sounds like plenty of time to move
up release cycles.
I don't agree with this either. For instance, the people maintaining
some applications, such as Evolution, have flatly refused to fix some
faults [1] with it in a current release (FC7). Their answer is you'll
have to use the next Fedora release (FC8). For some people this just
isn't practical, whether that simply is the hassles of changing a whole
OS to suit one application, or because that release doesn't work for you
on the whole.
That attitude can mean that some software never works. The current
release is always broken, with fixes only being applied to a future
version.
I was thinking in particular to gdm changing in my view simply to
change. The current state of gdm for development is pretty bad. I felt
things worked well as a login manager without the fading and transition
goodies that were added to later versions. I haven't use evolution since
one of the earlier phases of red carpet or its preceding gdm alternative
desktop sources. Of course that has nothing to do with needing to
upgrade to a newer release in order to get advancements. Maybe going to
a go.gnome, redcarpet or whatever there used to be needs to be
reimplemented for desktops for alternative sources of upstream desktop
sources.
1: One of them being that Evolution crashes if you try to use the date
picker when setting up filters or search folders.
I wouldn't know since I left Evolution back when the monkey twirled
around in that chair during updates.
Jim
--
"I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk"
-- John Huston
