Fedora

[Jarod Wilson]

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 12:54 -0400, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Bruce Labitt <bruce.labitt at verizon.net> wrote:
> > Is there a Fedora 10? or is that in alpha?
> 
>   The current "general release" is Fedora 9.
> 
>   From my point of view, the Fedora project is *always* in
> development/testing mode for the next release.  The stated goal of the
> Fedora Project is to provide a platform for the latest and greatest
> ideas in Open Source.  They target a general release every six months,
> but work for "the next release" is always happening.  That can be a
> good thing or an irritation, depending on what you want.
> 
> > Can one "relatively painlessly" upgrade from Fedora 9 to 10?

Yes.

>   The official upgrade path for Fedora is to download disc images for
> the latest release, burn and boot from disc, and follow the prompts to
> upgrade.
> 
>   I've read several reports about upgrading the running system
> in-place, using yum, but they always come with big warnings about how
> they're unofficial, not supported, here there be dragons, etc.

I wish we'd just suck it up and officially support it, since it tends to
work just peachy 99% of the time. That's exactly how I upgrade pretty
much *all* my boxes from one release to another.

>   The actual upgrade mechanism itself tends to work pretty well -- Red
> Hat's been doing this for 15 or so years, and they've gotten the
> techniques down.
> 
>   The problems arise from the packages being upgraded.  They don't
> always work so well.  Fedora is not afraid to scrap old ideas and try
> new ones.  Sometimes the new ideas don't actually work so well.
> Sometimes they try something for one release and then abandon it for
> the next.  Again, that's stated up-front: They're willing to sacrifice
> some backwards compatibility to advance the state of the art.

Indeed. While yes, to some extent, it is the "Red Hat Enterprise Linux
sandbox", its still very much a goal to put out a stable release with
shiny new features. We do *try* to not push new features unless they're
actually ready, but hey, you gotta break some eggs to make an
omelette... :)

>   I currently run Fedora at home.  It's kind of neat to be able to
> check out the latest neat features and cool software.  Having to
> upgrade every 12 months to maintain security updates is annoying.

Me, I hate stale software, so I tend to always be running at least the
latest Fedora release, if not the current development tree.

>   It's not really a "good" or "bad" by itself, but know what you're
> subscribing to.

Definitely. Fedora is geared toward pushing the envelope with new
technologies and features, with a more developer-centric feel than, say,
Ubuntu, which is geared towards polishing tried and true technologies
and features (that often appeared in the prior Fedora release... ;).
Really, Ubuntu does something very similar to what Red Hat does when a
new RHEL release is forked off of Fedora, they just do it on a more
frequent release schedule, and Debian-based instead of Fedora-based. :)


-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com