[lug] Fedora 7 is out, but don't yum upgrade

[Nate Duehr]

On Jun 3, 2007, at 4:41 PM, Collins Richey wrote:

>> You also have the added side-benefit of weeding out the devs who
>> "can't be bothered" with such niceties as taking care of the end-user
>> and making an upgrade a good experience for them.

In my experience - this would be called "good engineering", but hey  
-- what do I know, I've just been working on supporting whatever drek  
comes over the wall from Engineering (good or bad) for close to 20  
years now.

(Broken stuff keeps me in a job -- well most of the time anyway --  
but it would sure be nice if we were to a different level of "broken"  
after two decades of doing it.  Mostly I see the same mistakes by  
developers over and over and over and ... did I mention... over again.)

>> I think the majority of RH/Fedora devs *do* care, but they still have
>> an "out" when the going gets tough.  The leadership of Fedora should
>> close that loophole instead of apologizing for it.
>>
>
> I'm not convinced that very many of the Ubuntu / RH developers care to
> build a release that can be upgraded as a guaranteed process, and I'm
> quite sure that the leadership in both cases does not care. The
> mission in both cases is to tame the bleeding edge stuff sufficiently
> that many users can adopt it. Upgradability appears to be only
> important to Debian and Gentoo.

I wouldn't count the vast majority of the packages in mainstream  
Linux as "bleeding edge" anymore.  Broken alpha-quality code,  
perhaps, but not innovative enough to be called bleeding edge.

Some packages, yes.  But not anywhere near the majority.

> This is not to imply that either Debian or Gentoo is perfect in any
> respect. They just have a different mission in mind.

Totally agreed.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com