On 12/08/2016 11:10 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
It's my plan to explore different ideas to continue to make Fedora more
successful as measured by user and contributor growth, contributor
return on effort, and fulfillment of our mission.
Your stated goals are quite high level, so I would like to step back and ask some broad questions before discussing fairly detailed technical choices between your options.
I do realize that rehashing the 'rolling vs. point release' discussion can't be made in abstract, but I always had hard time separating technical and psychological, marketing and organizational arguments in that debate. I think you as the leadership should be thinking it through more clearly than I'm able to.

Specifically, I think that for someone who already has a working Fedora installation, the point releases are a distinction without much difference: I think the users want a smoothly running system being continuously upgraded. They don't care if sometimes such update takes longer and changes are deeper than usual. If all goes well, they should always be on a usable system. As a 'reductio ad absurdum' exercise, far out in the future, why should anyone be excited by arrival of Fedora 139? We're treating the releases as precious pets, but they are really doomed to become cattle :)

By the way, that's partly why I thought your historical plot was misleading. On one of my systems, I was one of the folks responsible for your F24 'unfulfilled potential' effect because I upgraded directly from F23 to F25. I did not have anything against F24---life happened, and I just simply didn't upgrade until I felt the EOL hammer hanging over me. I think that to really look at Fedora penetration and momentum, we'd have to only count new installs, or at least not count upgrades within the EOL window. I don't think we have data to do that.

On the other hand, point releases are useful for new users because they provide the 'new product' message that is a better draw than explaining why now is the right time to jump on a moving train. It's mostly psychology and marketing.

Point releases are of course essential organizational focus points for internal processes such as testing and QA, and they provide a framework to discuss new features and deep changes. I would argue that this is an internal consideration, except that it also might provide a useful marketing message.

So, my TL;DR message is, think carefully what aspects are important (technical? organizational? marketing?), what constituencies are involved in each, what changes are desirable, how to measure their effect, and then come up with processes to effect those changes.