On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 11:39, Gene Heskett wrote:
I disagree with this statement entirely. Fedora Core is not a stable release. For that reason, IMO, it is unsuitable for doing stable software development. OTOH, if one is designing commercial software, and wants a test machine or two set up the way one projects the world will be when the software is ready for release, then one probably needs to have something like Fedora core on those test machines.
And I disagree violently with that premise. Not everyone has the luxury of haveing a ready test mule, one that can be broken for extended periods of time while problems are worked out. We do use these machines in our everyday life.
Time to pick up a free copy of VMware player at http://www.vmware.com/ and figure out how to set up that test mule. In fact it would be nice if someone made a downloadable fedora image - the 'browser appliance' VM is actually ubuntu running firefox. Of course that doesn't really work out all the kernel and device driver options.
If I can't have a reasonable expectation of doing an upgrade and having it continue to work for the things that are important to me, then those cd's I download and burn will never get anywhere near the drive at reboot time.
Fedora has never promised that a version level upgrade will work. For machines where that and the fedora release schedule causes a problem you might like RHEL or Centos better. They don't promise that an upgrade will work either, but you don't have to do it so often.
The recent 4.0 release and its nightmares is a case in point. There is absolutely no excuse for such a broken install that takes a week for a guru to straighten out and a gig of downloads to fix stuff that should have been fixed in the release before the release was ever seeded to the servers.
They can't get fixed until someone reports the bugs.
I see us as the explorers of new ways to do things much more than fixit guru's.
You can always tell the pioneers by the arrows sticking out of their backs... The fixit guru's can only do their job after someone reports where the arrows came from.