Fedora update policy

[bepaald]

Hi!

I just got an email from my brother. He just got back from holiday and was happy there was finally an update for firefox, but it turned out it was for 3.0.12 (he's running F10). I myself am constantly nagged by ubuntu-using friends that fedora is too bleeding edge and unstable, but I sometimes get the feeling it's not true.

When I was using F8 I was a little disappointed at having to use firefox 2, but F8 was nearly (though still not) EOL. Also, I had read that the update would be problematic because many packages depended on the older firefox, though this later seemed strange as updating with remi's repo worked splendidly.

Also, looking at koji, it seems that KDE 4.3 (due out in a week or so) will not be coming to the brand new F11, as the betas are only built for F12, or am I interpreting this wrong? (I am running 4.3 RC2 from the kde-redhat project and I think its a real improvement by the way, I really recommend it.)

Anyway, does anyone know why some (popular) packages are not updated in supported versions of Fedora, even though they seem to work just fine? And specifically what is the deal with FF in F10?

thanks,
bepaald

[bob]

You may want to pose these questions to the devs, since we're just 'users helping users' here. The FedoraProject Jump (above) has a Communicate link that you'd find handy.

[William Haller]

Rex Dieter does a really good job of getting the new KDE packages ported to older Fedora releases (along with a host of other O/Ss). I was a kde-redhat user for quite a while as well, but now that he has become actively involved in Fedora, it hasn't seemed necessary. The packages appear reasonably soon. Be patient, and I'd bet it would be available before EOL.

I can't speak for FF since it does seem to be tied into a host of other things on the other side. That's one nice thing about sticking with KDE as much as possible. Pretty much everything you need gets updated to near latest faster than the normal Fedora release cycle.

[Nokia]

Originally Posted by bepaald

Hi!

I just got an email from my brother. He just got back from holiday and was happy there was finally an update for firefox, but it turned out it was for 3.0.12 (he's running F10). I myself am constantly nagged by ubuntu-using friends that fedora is too bleeding edge and unstable, but I sometimes get the feeling it's not true.

When I was using F8 I was a little disappointed at having to use firefox 2, but F8 was nearly (though still not) EOL. Also, I had read that the update would be problematic because many packages depended on the older firefox, though this later seemed strange as updating with remi's repo worked splendidly.

Also, looking at koji, it seems that KDE 4.3 (due out in a week or so) will not be coming to the brand new F11, as the betas are only built for F12, or am I interpreting this wrong? (I am running 4.3 RC2 from the kde-redhat project and I think its a real improvement by the way, I really recommend it.)

Anyway, does anyone know why some (popular) packages are not updated in supported versions of Fedora, even though they seem to work just fine? And specifically what is the deal with FF in F10?

thanks,
bepaald

To run Firefox3.5 in F10 get it from Remi's repo.

su
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-10.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-10.rpm
yum update firefox --enablerepo=remi

[leigh123linux]

Originally Posted by William Haller

Rex Dieter does a really good job of getting the new KDE packages ported to older Fedora releases (along with a host of other O/Ss). I was a kde-redhat user for quite a while as well, but now that he has become actively involved in Fedora, it hasn't seemed necessary. The packages appear reasonably soon. Be patient, and I'd bet it would be available before EOL.

I can't speak for FF since it does seem to be tied into a host of other things on the other side. That's one nice thing about sticking with KDE as much as possible. Pretty much everything you need gets updated to near latest faster than the normal Fedora release cycle.

For KDE-4.3 testing

http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-re...unstable/RPMS/

su
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
curl -O http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/fedora/kde.repo
yum --enablerepo=kde-unstable update

[rexbinary]

Based purely on my observations of what updates I have received since I have been a Fedora user, it seems they generally do not make major version jumps within a single release of Fedora.

For example, and as you mentioned, F10 shipped with 3.0.x Firefox, and it will probably never receive anything newer then 3.0.x.

My best guess is that it's not worth it to go back and qualify a major release like Firefox 3.5 on F10 which will be EOL in about 4 months when it's available on F11, and they are busy working on F12. Major bugs and security patches make sense for F10 now since it's not EOL, but not major upgrades.

I think what it means is if you want the most recent apps, you should be running the most recent Fedora.

But as it's already been pointed out, the devs would be the best people to ask.