Views from an Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Fedora migrator

[Bob Jonkman]

On 12-10-20 12:08 PM, Peter King wrote:
> This baffles me. Why accept any half-bakedness for any time at all, 
> in your working environment?

If I knew about half-bakedness ahead of time I wouldn't install it.  I
don't think anyone would intentionally install something they knew to be
half-baked. My point was that I'd only have to wait for the next point
release to see if it was fixed; not the entire LTS cycle.

And this is what test environments are for. Any half-bakedness should be
discovered when you test a new release. Anyone who installs untested
software in a production environment should be made to return their
sysadmin hat.

> Why should anyone put up with half-bakedness forced on them as a 
> consequence of a release schedule? That's what the Other OSes do -- 
> OSX and Windows -- and there it's part of the whole package, take it 
> or leave it.

Even on a timed-release distro like Ubuntu you're not forced to accept
the whole package.  You can add repositories from application developers
to ensure you stay up-to-date on critical software, or you can pin
packages at an older version number to avoid known half-bakedness in
recent releases.  Windows and MacOS probably not so much.

--Bob.

On 12-10-20 12:08 PM, Peter King wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 11:44:31AM -0400, Bob Jonkman wrote:
> 
>> And there are four significant minor releases throughout the life 
>> of the LTS editions, so you're not stuck with half-bakedness too 
>> long.
> 
> This baffles me. Why accept any half-bakedness for any time at all, 
> in your working environment?
> 
> Debian stable is exactly that, rock-solid (if unexciting and not 
> up-to-date), and Debian Testing, which I ran for years, is more solid
> than these "timed release" distros. Now I prefer Gentoo, which is not
> only a very solid stable rolling-release, but which is transparent
> all the way through (not only the package management system but the
> software itself is all open to inspection, fiddling, and
> recompiling). If I want to risk more bleeding-edge software I can
> always unmask packages, or use Gentoo unstable, or just write a shell
> script (an ebuild) and compile them myself; when things break I know
> who broke them, and often why they broke.
> 
> But never mind *which* distro we're talking about. Why should anyone
>  put up with half-bakedness forced on them as a consequence of a 
> release schedule? That's what the Other OSes do -- OSX and Windows --
> and there it's part of the whole package, take it or leave it. Well,
> I left it, and I'm not going to take it again.
> 

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