Fedora 18 Is Now One Month Behind Schedule

[r1348]

who cares how long they take to release it? I'm using it right now and it's the best linux ever made.

fedora is linux for pros and all the others are compiled with aids and fail


I know this won't happen but I wish they would readjust the schedule and ship fedora 18 with the 3.7 kernel... they would be so far ahead of the competition it wouldn't even be funny

elementary looks all pretty and gay but kernel 3.2 LOLOL, they are going to release a 3.2 kernel based distro in december or january 2013...

all ubuntu based distros are cancer.

what fedora needs is a software center and less anal about repos etc

Are you 12?

[Hamish Wilson]

Personally, I have no real reason to care as long as it is out before January, as I have certain other commitments that need to be followed before I can get my hands on some necessary hardware to do the upgrade. So it looks like I will be jumping ship from Fedora 16 right about the time it's support cycle is up, which I really do not mind as for the most part Fedora 16 has been running great for me. I am looking forward to Kernel 3.6, Xfce 4.10, Gimp 2.8, and a few other version upgrades I have been waiting on though. Still, I would much rather have the next version just work when I jump to it than have it be out before I would logically need it anyway, and the Fedora team seems to understand this.

[drago01]

I know this won't happen but I wish they would readjust the schedule and ship fedora 18 with the 3.7 kernel... they would be so far ahead of the competition it wouldn't even be funny

Fedora does get kernel updates during its lifetime. Fedora 17 uses 3.6.1 now and will likely get 3.7 as well. Chances are that F18 will get 3.8 as well.

[AdamW]

we can't really do a 'spin' of Fedora with a completely different update model, it's too big a difference. spins are just different collections of packages from the release-time package set, fundamentally. you can't use the 'spins' model to have a different branch of Fedora with a completely different update policy, it doesn't scale that far.

I don't think we could have both a rolling release 'stable' Fedora and a stable release Fedora, it's essentially maintaining two different distributions and we don't have the dev resources for that. One of the reasons I think the rolling release model might be interesting for Fedora (to be clear this is a personal opinion and I'm not on any of the major Fedora boards or committees, there is no suggestion that this will actually _happen_, it's just me shootin' the breeze) is actually that we barely have the resources to support two or three stable releases at a time anyhow, and a rolling release model reduces the support burden quite considerably. If we were going to do it it'd probably only make sense to just switch.

BTW, you can kind of hack up a rolling release model with Fedora as it is, that's what I do on my desktop. It's not real pretty but it more or less works. I installed my system with F15, then when F16 Alpha came out, I yum upgraded to that, stuck on F16 till F17 Alpha came out, yum upgraded to that, and so on. The upgrade to Alpha can be a bit rocky and you can get some instability until the Beta comes out, but it's viable if you don't mind fixing things up now and again.

On an LTS release, the problem is really the same as the release model thing - resources. Supporting a release for a long time takes considerable resources and Fedora just doesn't have those. There's really nothing at all to stop it happening if people wanted to make it happen, this has been the case for years - all it would take is a group of people to step up and say they'll act as the long-term maintenance team, porting security fixes back to packages that are three or four years old. So far, no-one wants to do that, and corporate sponsors like RH don't see any value in paying anyone to do it. So it doesn't happen. If someone did step up, though, it could happen.

[t0ken]

Rolling updates is just a completely different release model from stable releases. You can't really say one is 'better' than the other, each has advantages and drawbacks. No major RH customer would want a rolling release version of RHEL, for instance. Stable releases provide a sysadmin with an assurance that the system will, basically, work the same way throughout its lifetime. Rolling updates do not allow this. By their nature there will be 'regular' system updates that cause massive changes to system behaviour and may require significant manual care and feeding. This is great for a geek enthusiast, it is not much use for a stable deployment.

Personally I think the rolling release model might make a deal of sense for Fedora and it'd be interesting to try it, but it's certainly not the case that rolling release is simply 'better' than stable releases. It's good for some use cases, terrible for others.

Fedora already has a minimal installation option. At present it installs around 200 packages and uses 770MB of disk space (F18). There's some discussion on the devel list at present as to how some core components could possibly be split up to make a minimal install more space efficient.

Wow, a response from the great AdamW! I started using Linux at the tail-end of your time with Mandriva (v. 2009 was my first Linux distro and is what I learned with). Just find it kinda cool that we're actually having a dialogue, lol.

I certainly agree with your take on rolling vs. stable releases. In fact I'd love it if Fedora released a longterm supported version (similar to Ubuntu's LTS), so that I know I won't have to reinstall my system at some point in the near(-ish) future, but even that is non-existent. And it's not even the fact that I have to reinstall, b/c even that isn't entirely true with the pre-upgrade feature (though, I guess that's been taken out for something built from the ground up?). Idk, I guess it's just that Arch fits what I want to do with my system more closely than Fedora. And I don't mean to bash Fedora at all, and in fact I don't mean to insinuate that rolling is "better" than stable release cycles. Everyone has their preference and everyone should use what fits them best, be that Windows, *nix or OSX...I don't think their can be a "best" OS. It's just too subjective. I personally like the rolling release cycle better and would likely use Fedora if there was a spin with that feature.

Interesting, I'd love to see where that ends up (re: stripping more out of the minimal spin).

[AdamW]

Agreed 100%. This is probably the main reason I don't use Fedora. That and perhaps having a minimal install version such as Arch. Since I work all day on Red Hat servers, it would make things much more intuitive (I currently run Arch on all my machines except for personal servers, which use FreeBSD).

Rolling updates is just a completely different release model from stable releases. You can't really say one is 'better' than the other, each has advantages and drawbacks. No major RH customer would want a rolling release version of RHEL, for instance. Stable releases provide a sysadmin with an assurance that the system will, basically, work the same way throughout its lifetime. Rolling updates do not allow this. By their nature there will be 'regular' system updates that cause massive changes to system behaviour and may require significant manual care and feeding. This is great for a geek enthusiast, it is not much use for a stable deployment.

Personally I think the rolling release model might make a deal of sense for Fedora and it'd be interesting to try it, but it's certainly not the case that rolling release is simply 'better' than stable releases. It's good for some use cases, terrible for others.

Fedora already has a minimal installation option. At present it installs around 200 packages and uses 770MB of disk space (F18). There's some discussion on the devel list at present as to how some core components could possibly be split up to make a minimal install more space efficient.

[t0ken]

Rolling updates/releases like Gentoo or Arch would be better...

Agreed 100%. This is probably the main reason I don't use Fedora. That and perhaps having a minimal install version such as Arch. Since I work all day on Red Hat servers, it would make things much more intuitive (I currently run Arch on all my machines except for personal servers, which use FreeBSD).

fedora is linux for pros and all the others are compiled with aids and fail

Lol, that was a funny joke.

[AdamW]

I'm not sure why Michael didn't put more detail in the story, since it's all there in the logs, but if anyone was wondering, what's delaying Beta is the new upgrade tool. Part of the installer rewrite for F18 involves re-doing how upgrades happen: preupgrade is no more, and anaconda no longer handles upgrades either. There's a new upgrade tool which works more or less like preupgrade, but is new code: it runs a preparation step from your current running install, then reboots and completes the upgrade, not via anaconda now but via dracut. This will be the only recommended upgrade mechanism for future Fedora releases, from F18 on.

The minor problem is that it isn't done yet. =) Everything else is more or less in line for Beta, but the new upgrade tool is still incomplete and not testable. We're not freezing for Beta until it's at least code complete.

[Rigaldo]

I'm using it right now and it's the best linux ever made.

This is pretty subjective .. I have many qualms with this, but it also goes with personal preference.
Elementary's window manager seems to be the faster and smoothest among anything composited I've used, heck it competes with openbox on speed.
Gay? lol
While it DOES seem like a Mac in various places, I find it pretty beautiful.

Although I'd partly agree about the kernel part .. -.-
Not that it prevents me from using it fine.
Btw, NO, and I repeat, NO distribution other than Ubuntu or derivatives that I tried(and that's a bit ) can fully support power management on my laptop and have it run at normal temperatures, and I've tried various kernels on both ends as well as both open and closed driver(AMD). And also, I've tried the latest version of Fedora about 1-1.5 months ago.
Ubuntu is great. Fedora is mostly meant as a testing bed for Red Hat, isn't that right? I've had many issues every time I used it, and it didn't seem like a distro for casual use from the start. But I agree, it was pretty damn fast. The power management is automatic no go though ..

It's cool to like Fedora, its a cool OS, but don't undermine others, please, especially when you shouldn't. This is fanboyism, and counterproductive for Linux, Open Source, Fedora and everyone.
Except Apple cause they're Evil and behind everything that is bad in any way .. And their minion microsoft.
(j/k?)

** Btw, pretty and gay have different meanings. ^_^

[pipe13]

To paraphrase Fesco: "If we didn't have a release schedule, we'd never release a product. If we actually enforced the schedule, no one would use it."