Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 24, 2013 19:43 UTC (Wed) by orev (guest, #50902)
Parent article: Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Having not used Fedora in a long time, my perception is that Fedora is a distro that's always on the cutting-edge, and breaks things frequently with updates. It seems like its main purpose is to be a testbed for things that will eventually go into a RHEL release.

I don't want to worry about that on my primary system. If I need to reinstall or rebuild every 6 months, I just don't have time for that. A primary workstation needs to be solid and just work.

That might not be accurate, but that's my perception, and I bet a lot of others have similar ideas about it.

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Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 24, 2013 20:29 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that's a fair perception. Often when an update breaks something, it's because of upstream breaking compatibility (foo version 1.9 is subtly incompatible with databases saved by foo version 1.8), but Fedora just doesn't have the manpower to verify all new upstream versions, nor to carefully backport security fixes to foo 1.8 as Debian would.

A reinstall every 12 months is okay, for many applications (IMHO you should configure your server so it can be reinstalled from scratch quickly in any case) but day-to-day breakage caused by seemingly innocuous package updates is not. And while I am happy to keep my server configuration under version control so I can reinstall it, nobody wants to bother with that stuff for their personal workstation.

That said, 99% of the time 'yum update' works just fine, perhaps with an Apache restart needed in the worst case.

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 31, 2013 10:56 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

Intersting to see that most Fedora users still download & do a fresh install while the openSUSE folks have largely moved on to in-place upgrading: http://youtu.be/NwfohZ8RBd8?t=16m40s

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Aug 2, 2013 2:57 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Agreed. I don't remember the last time I did a fresh install on a machine which wasn't brand new.

On this laptop, "yum history info 1" lists F15 packages (it's currently F19). The desktop has F17 as its original history entry, so I guess I did to a reinstall for it (though I don't remember why exactly…).

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 24, 2013 20:58 UTC (Wed) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link]

Somewhat cutting edge and a testbed, yes, I'd agree more or less. But otherwise, IMHO, your perception is wrong.

I can't remember when a stable update broke anything and I've been a Fedora user from the beginnings and a Red Hat user before that. It must have happened but I actually can't recall when was the last time, it's so infrequent.

What could Fedora do to change the reputation of being unstable? RHEL is far more stable, naturally, but otherwise...

Also, each release isn't supported for 6 months but for appx. 13 months. Support lasts until one month after a n+2 release, e.g. Fedora 17 support will end one month after Fedora 19 release.

IMHO that's a question of being informed. Google returns the relevant wiki articles as top results for "fedora support cycle" or "fedora release support".

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 25, 2013 9:46 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

> breaks things frequently with updates.

No more than most other non-enterprise / non-LTS distros.

> It seems like its main purpose is to be a testbed for things that will eventually go into a RHEL release.

No, it's main purpose is to be a working distro.

I'm not a RHEL beta-tester, but I've used Fedora continuously for years as my main desktop and have also used it (somewhat customised) for both development and production platforms. If you don't want to rebuild after 6 months then don't. The platform doesn't start disintegrating after 6 months.

Miller: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next"

Posted Jul 26, 2013 22:33 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Admittedly, I run much less software than the standard DE's ship with, but Rawhide has been great for the past 2–3 years on my main machine at home, so stability (overall; there are hiccups[1]) hasn't been an issue for a while. Only the really major changes really impacted me (UsrMove and systemd) and those were handled just fine with instructions from the wiki (and fedup in the future I would assume).

If by "a long time" you mean around F9–F12, there was a lot of churn going on at the time between KDE4, PulseAudio, RPM changes (xz compression? hash check changes? I can't remember for sure), GNOME 3, Upstart (F13? F14?), GRUB2, and more I'm sure I've forgotten.

[1]https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=957500