[CentOS] General question on QA from a Fedora Core fan

Fri Apr 29 18:33:58 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 11:49, Craig White wrote:
> > You might like ubuntu which doesn't force you to make a choice
> > between stability and having up to date applications, although they
> > haven't been around long enough to see if they can really manage a
> > fast release schedule without introducing a lot of new bugs.
> > 
> > http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
> > 
> ----
> the notion of being 'forced' to choose between stability and up-to-date
> is absurd - the reality is as it is.
> 
> Stability is tested, confirmed, supported.
> 
> Up-to-date is new, less tested, less confirmed, not supported.

That may be what you want it to mean but to me stability means that it
doesn't crash and works with current hardware.  Often, even a less
tested new version of something is better than the old one when the
recent changes add needed support for new hardware or were made as
a result of known problems in the well-tested (but buggy) old version.
And as far as support goes, the closer you are to the upstream
programmer's current version the better the support is going to be for
anything but backed-in patches for some simple problem.

> One cannot be both.

Newer isn't always better, but it often is.  The programmers had their
reasons to make the changes.  Besides, you may want the latest
application features but not untested device drivers.

> Ubuntu similarly makes choices - the choices aren't
> apparent to user until user chooses repositories for apt - after all it
> is a Debian distribution.
> 
> Sometimes I wish you understood your own references.

Yes, someone has made the choices, but they make them separately for the
base os/libs and the applications, and we can hope they are people who
know what they are doing.  With the fedora/RHEL split the user gets
an all-or-nothing choice so when you want the next version of evolution,
for example, you'll have to install a package containing whatever
device drivers the fedora people would like to put into widespread
testing at the same time - or wait years for it in RHEL. Ubuntu is
gaining popularity precisely because they *don't* bundle everything into
the same distributions (or lack thereof...) as Debian and they are
starting out in a way that makes sense.  It remains to be seen whether
they can keep up with their goals of a fast release schedule and
upgrade (vs. reinstall) capability and maintain stability.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com