[CentOS] How to encourage maintainers to update their software

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 12:36:33PM -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
> I don't want to tear my whole computer down and upgrade my operating
> system every six months, and I don't want to deal with the
> bleeding-edge stuff that might or might not work when it affects
> something like network connectivity or whether I actually get a
> picture on the screen when I boot up my computer. But for userland
> programs, why not run the latest version of Libreoffice or Cool
> Reader if it's easy to compile them and I can get a few new features
> out of it?

This is one of the reasons I'm in favor of bringing Flatpak to Fedora
(and presumably also eventually to CentOS). We have a project to
automatically convert Fedora packages to Flatpaks, which you could then
run on a CentOS base.

That's really just an approach for desktop apps, though. Fedora
Modularity aims to solve this for other software stacks, allowing you
to keep longer-lived streams for the stuff you don't want to change,
and faster streams for the stuff you do want different.

All that said, I do also feel *some* need to mention that Fedora gives
you a 13-month lifecycle, not six months. And, in most cases, you can
upgrade in under half an hour without no fuss.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader