On Jan 24, 2010, at 8:08 AM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> Why is this viewed so much different from every other open source  
> project?
>
> Do you keep installing the daily release of the Linux Kernel on your
> server machines?  No!
>
> You wait for a major release of Fedora, or Debian, or Ubuntu, which  
> happens
> every six months or year.

One exception, of course, is bug and security fixes.  I *want* to keep  
my production CentOS box up to date with bug and security fixes.  I  
understand that those changes are going to come on their own  
timeframe.  I do *not* necessarily want to track every new release of  
the OS.

That, in my view, is a big drawback to the monolithic trunk update  
stream: it mixes (for example) important bug fixes with (for example)  
updates and extensions to browsers.

So it would be nice if we had some code/tool/community support for  
dispersing code broadly to as many "forks" as possible, where "fork"  
means not just things like Pharo and Cuis but also older versions of  
Squeak and my little Squeak/Seaside image running on my CentOS box  
where I want to load as little code as possible so as to lower the  
chance of breaking something.

David