Why does Fedora not release revisions?

[av_lin]

I do remember that during the old Red Hat days, revisions to a version # used to be released. For example, my laptop is running Red Hat 7.2. But with Fedora, it seems like we always get a single official release to which subsequent updates and fixes are added. But given that a FC 6 update already needs downloading something like 500-1000MB, I just don't understand why there is not a FC 6.1 that includes all the fixes since the first release? It just makes no sense to me, because it is a pain for those who are installing well after the first release, and it is also a general waste of bandwidth to download a second time for the updates.

So is there an official reasoning for this policy?

Obviously, I am not the only one who wonders about this, because there is a whole user community who is issuing so called respins that include all the updates. But they are not quite "official" and not everbody wants to have Bittorrent running on their machines.

[JN4OldSchool]

I cant speak officially but I imagine it has something to do with an official new version being offered every 6 months. Now, there does happen to be a revised FC6. It is called the respin from the unity project. I cant give you the link off the top of my head but it wouldnt be hard to search for. Just type respin in the search box.

edit: sorry, just read the end of your post Well, no bittorrent then your screwed. Cant have everything your way I guess...

[Dies]

Red Hat is released every ?
and Fedora is released every ? what like six months or so.
That means within a six month span they would be releasing how many versions ?
That doesn't make much sense to me, and obviously not to the developers either.


Don't get me wrong I agree with what you're saying but just not on the solution.

[Jman]

You also have to think of the mirrors. Every new release adds tens of gigabytes to what they provide. It is not insignificant. And doing quality assurance on a release, even an update release, every two months is a lot of work. Release frequency gets discussed on the devel mailing list every so often.

The Unity project will get you respins. Ask nicely and they might get you it if bittorrent doesn't work.

[foolish]

As JMan noted, Fedora Unity has developed tools to semi-automatically rebuild the Fedora iso images with the updates, these are released as re-spins and distributed through bittorrent at: http://torrent.fedoraunity.org/

now for the future and why it is so bright:

At the same time, or in response to the work done by Unity, I'm not sure, the Fedora Project itself has undergone huge changes in it's very core design in the process leading up to the release of Fedora 7, which for reasons I'm about to explained won't be a Fedora Core release at all. The Extras and Core projects are to be merged into one project, Fedora. Up untill now there have been Fedora Core, maintained almost exclusively by Red Hat people, and Fedora Extras, with packages maintained by the Fedora community. The separation doesn't really make any sense and feeds into the belief that Extras is some kind of second class citizen, which is not true, the packages in Extras are of higher quality than the packages in Core, one of the reasons for the merge to take place is for core to adopt the quality ensurance of the Extras project.

Anyhow, the resulting Fedora pool of packages will be released to users in various different "spins", composed by using tools similar to the ones developed by Unity. There will be a "Desktop Spin", a "Server Spin", a "KDE Spin" and so forth. The tools developed to make these spins will also make it real easy for people to create their own custom spins, custom as in containing packages from outside of Fedora, like packages for mp3 supports. They will also make the work Unity is currently doing easier, providing high quality re-spins (or revisions) in the future as well as live-cd-spins and more. As alway, the future is bright.

(remember, Fedora is trademarked, you can re-spin something based on Fedora and call it Fedora without permission)

[Dies]

Originally Posted by foolish

(remember, Fedora is trademarked, you can re-spin something based on Fedora and call it Fedora without permission)

Can or can't ?