On Thu, 8 Dec 2016 12:40:49 -0500
Przemek Klosowski <przemek.klosowski(a)nist.gov> wrote:
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 :)
...snip...
I just want to note here why I don't think rolling releases are great
for everyone: WIth a rolling release you have to roughly consume
changes as maintainers of your release push them to you. With a point
release system you have much more choice when to switch.
For example, say you are a heavy user of libreoffice and have a
important class using it. You don't want to be forced to upgrade while
you are busy using the application, you would rather wait until you are
in a time of lesser activity and spent the time then to learn the new
version.
kevin