where to base?

[Christopher Blizzard]

I've been talking on and off with a couple of people about where to base 
our operating system.  Over the last couple of months we've been 
following Rawhide, which hasn't been a walk in the park.  (It's 
development, so things have broken from time to time.)  FC6 is going to 
be released in a couple of days, so we've been talking a little bit 
about where to go.  Do we:

1. Stop with FC6 and use that as a basis for development

2. Follow FC7 development and expect that the timeline for FC7 will line 
up with our shipping schedules (which isn't an unreasonable assumption 
given that FC7 will be today + 6 months, I believe.) [1]

3. Use FC6 + the RHEL5 kernel.  Maximum kernel focus (hundreds of 
engineers can't be wrong - right?), security updates are easy, things 
don't move much.

I had originally been a big fan of 3 (FC6 + RHEL5 kernel) but I think 
that others have talked me into using 1 (FC6.)  The main reasons being:

o The kernel will move a little faster (including rebases) and we're 
still in development.  It's not time to draw in the reins quite yet on 
the kernel.[2]

o The kinds of places where the RHEL5 kernel will see changes are 
largely in things we never touch.  i.e. lots of big storage drivers, VM 
changes for large systems and things like that.  Plus, we'll get 
security updates for at least a year, probably more.  No guarantees on 
timing, of course, but they will be there.

o FC6 is easy for everyone involved to install and it's a solid base for 
software development.  A known good.

2 (FC7) as an option hasn't appealed to me because it's too much 
movement at this time.  We're somewhere between polish and development 
and we can pull in what we need from FC7 into our private OLPC 
repositories.  This won't scale forever and at some point we might need 
to pull the FC7 trigger, but I think that we'll be able to cross that 
bridge when we come to it.

Thoughts?

--Chris

1. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule

2. http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/56869.html