RE: stable Fedora releases?

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• In reply to: Jack Howarth: "stable Fedora releases?"
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To: "'For users of Fedora Core releases'" <fedora-list@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 11:42:49 -0600

> -----Original Message-----
> Okay, up front I realize that Fedora is a hobbyist
> release... but the same could be said of Debian. With that
> said, is there
> any plan in place for eventually having a benchmark stable
> Fedora release which would be equivalent to the Stable branch
> of Debian? I ask because it is unclear if one will be able to
> install a Core release and get access to the proper security
> patches without constantly upgrading Fedora to the point of
> it reverting back to a Test release (for the next Core of
> course). I know in the academic environment many folks are
> looking at Fedora as a successor to RedHat 9 but I am afraid
> it is more likely to be a Debian Unstable type release at best.
> Jack

If you want to use Fedora but remain stable, why not just stay one release
behind. Fedora Core 2 has some stability issues on some hardware
configurations because it is impossible to test all hardware configurations
before release. After FC2 has been out for a month or so it will have the
updates it needs to be acceptably stable.

I have FC1 running on two computers and have no issues with either. I only
installed FC1 about a month ago and applied all the updates using yum, and I
use yum to check for updates daily. If necessary you could push FC1 out for
even longer due to the legacy project, you just have to update the yum.conf
with the repository that the legacy project is going to use.

Now of course maybe you want the 2.6 kernel on a distro where everything is
set up to work with 2.6. In that case why not stick with FC1 for a couple
of months, after FC2 has had several patches released to resolve any quirky
issues then you can switch to FC2.

Fedora is meant to be cutting edge releases of linux and open source
applications. I would say that it is more stable than Debian Unstable, but
less reliable than RHEL. It's a trade off. RH9 was a bit more stable than
FC2, but when RH9 was first released it had some stability issues that were
eventually resolved. RH8 and RH9 were always less stable than RHEL.

RHEL has a really slow development cycle. Everything added to it is
thoroughly tested before release and security is highly tested before
release. RH wants to make sure that RHEL can be used for mission critical
systems, like Government, Banks, Air Traffic control, Telecommunications.
This means that no application that is even slightly unstable can be added
to RHEL.

Basic RHL 7, 8, 9 was mostly stable and on a reasonably fast release
schedule. There was no requirement that the Basic RH releases had to be
100% stable, but a lot of testing was done before release to make sure it
was acceptably stable. Basic RH was a money sink for Red Hat, because most
people just downloaded it for free off the net, and pulled the updates off
the ftp site or the mirrors, Red Hat was doing a lot of work for a product
that they could never profit from.

Fedora is a lot like Debian, it is a community supported distro. Red Hat
keeps their hand in, guiding the development cycle and decisions on some of
the packages to be included. However, they are not the only voice adding
things to Fedora, the community has a lot of say that they didn't have
before. Fedora aspires to be cutting edge, a testing ground for linux and
applications. That's not to say it can't be stable, it just means that when
any release first comes out there is bound to be a few bugs. Fedora is way
better than Debian because we get a much quicker release cycle that sees
innovations implemented much more quickly. I want to use Fedora because
though I might sacrifice a bit of stability, at the same time I get to learn
and test all the cutting edge applications that probably wont show up in
RHEL for about a year.

If you have a mission critical server, then use RHEL, Slackware, Debian
Stable, Suse, etc...

If you want a distro that you can test out new applications on, then Fedora
is the one to go with. As I said at the beginning if you want to use Fedora
cautiously then just stay one update cycle behind. FC1 will continue
getting updates for a few more months, after FC2 has had a few updates then
switch over to FC2.

Gerald

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• Previous message: Brian Ashe: "Re: Boot Floppy > 1440"
• In reply to: Jack Howarth: "stable Fedora releases?"
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