On 12/28/2014 08:52 PM, Always Learning wrote: > On Thu, 2014-12-18 at 10:30 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> .............. The design changes are done in Fedora, . > What type of large commercial organisation lets undisciplined people > make adverse changes detrimental to the reputation and ultimate success > of its 'stable' commercial product. Any organization using open source. More specifically, any organization that uses the Linux Kernel. Or have you never read the linux kernel mailing list (LKML)? Open source by its very nature is somewhat 'undisciplined' in that any particular project's discipline (or, to use a fifty-dollar word, 'governance') is entirely self-imposed by the project members, and some projects have 'better' discipline/governance than others. This is the cost of decentralized development of core pieces of the operating system; it is an acceptable cost for my uses. And I intentionally put 'better' in quotes because what is 'better' is entirely subjective. > * The dramatic upheaval in C7; Had EL7 been a straight clone of Fedora 20 it would/could have been much worse. Try out F20 for a while to see the differences. > * The claimed life-span of C5 truncated by no more normal upgrades; Define 'normal' upgrades. Are you talking about the 'quarterly' updates that masquerade as 'point' releases? (Yeah, yeah, I know they're not strictly quarterly, but go read some of the early EL literature......) > * The changes introduced in C6.6, during the lifetime of an allegedly > stable C6 product; > The Update 6 releases seem from my view to have been substantial upheavals and opportunities to get somewhat major things pushed in. EL5 update 6 was no exception, and, as I recall, EL4 update 6 wasn't, either, but that's been a while, so I may not be remembering it completely; and I don't remember much of anything about the 3u5 to 3u6 transition. At least during this cycle Red Hat staggered the releases unlike the triple-threat posed last major release cycle, where 4u10, 5u6, and 6GA all 'hit' within weeks of each other. Red Hat is walking a tightrope here, and, honestly, I think they are doing a fantastic job in what they do, given the fact that they are not going to please all of their users any particular time. The users' requirements are just too varied, and many of those requirements are mutually exclusive. They're not going to please any one of the users all the time, either.