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Revision as of 20:28, 4 March 2010 by Jwboyer (talk | contribs)

Stable Release Update Vision

Background

Recent discussions on various Fedora mailing lists have shown that we currently have a wide variety of positions on what Fedora's update strategy should look like. These range from a 'rolling' release, to a locked down security-only update solution. The lack of clarity on this is contributing to confusion among package maintainers and end users alike. While everyone agrees that broken updates are detrimental to the Fedora distribution and should be avoided at all costs, there is no agreement on how to accomplish that nor is there agreement on what is an acceptable update. In light of this, the Fedora Board is issuing a stable release update vision statement to help guide the creation and implementation of a Fedora Updates policy.

Factors

When creating an updates overview, there are several factors that need to be taken into account. The first is keeping in mind our target audience, which someone who:

  1. is voluntarily switching to Linux
  2. is familiar with computers but is not necessarily a hacker or developer
  3. is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with Fedora, and
  4. wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Productivity is important to such a user, which means a shifting platform and visible behavioural changes are going to make them less productive. Similarly, dealing with a large number of updates on a regular basis will be distracting. Also, while the target user is likely to file a bug when something goes wrong, they are not expecting a stable release to utilize users as guinea pigs.


Vision Statement