RFE: Retire Fedora Core 4 only _after_ FC6 has been released.

[Gilboa Davara]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 02:46 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:

>  From what I recall, the general plan with Fedora Core all along has
> been to maintain one OS release, however ending the maintenance of
> Fedora Core 3 as soon as Fedora Core 4 comes out, or ending Fedora
> Core 4 maintenance as soon as Fedora Core 5 is released, would have
> the effect of immediately requiring all users to upgrade to the new
> release on release day or end up using a system that is no longer
> updated.
> 
> Since it was desired that there be a time window to let people do
> the upgrade, rather than have to do it immediately, some maintenance
> overlap of 3 months was added to the initial plan.  This would give
> the general 6 month per release goal a 3 month overlap, or 9 months
> total for the life of any given Fedora Core OS release.
> 
> However, it was also part of the plan that the 6 month release
> cycles wouldn't be carved in stone, but could slide ahead or
> backward in time for various reasons if we felt there were good
> enough benefits to the project to hold back on a release a bit
> longer, or push one out sooner.  So instead of making the policy
> be "maintenance for 9 months", it became maintenance for one
> OS release plus the time during the next development cycle up
> to test2.  ie:  Release N is maintained until release N+2 test2.
> 
> In other words, Fedora Core 3, is maintained until Fedora Core 5 test2.
> Or in even other words, users are expected to upgrade to each new
> OS release as it comes out if they want to keep their systems running
> "maintained" software, however when a new OS release comes out, they
> have a window of time that their existing OS will continue to be
> maintained which is approximately 3 months, but which might be slightly
> shorter or longer depending on the development schedule of the next
> OS release after that.
> 
> The concept of Fedora Legacy however, is to enable the community to
> maintain the OS releases indefinitely if there is such a desire and
> motivation in the community to see that happen.
> 
> The Fedora Legacy project just recently released a large update which
> had hundreds of packages in it for Fedora Core 1, and I presume for
> Fedora Core 2 as well.  As long as there are enough people in the
> community using the older OS releases, there are likely to be a
> percentage of them who are developers or package maintainers who are
> willing to contribute to Fedora Legacy.
> 
> I believe the current scheme is as it should be, and if anything, we
> should shorten the maintenance time on Fedora Core releases and transfer
> the maintenance of the older OS release to Legacy at the test1 phase,
> to enable developers to have more time to spend developing the current
> release.
> 
> 

I accept that FC dev simply do not have the resources required to
sustain two releases.
But as I said in another post, my problem is not with the actual
hand-over to FC-L, but with the manual intervention required by the
user/admin in-order to reconfigure the machine to use FC-L.
I fear that most unsuspecting/unexperienced users will fail to see the
hand-over message, and even if they do, they won't know how to use FC-L,
leaving their machines open to attacks.

To me, FC4 was somewhat of a mixed bag.
While I'm using on all my workstations, all my servers remained FC3.
More-ever, all the people I switched to Linux still use FC3. (For the
same reason).
This being, I'm now faced with the need to visit each machine and
configure it to use FC-L. /Not/ what I call fun :(

FC-L should become a true member of FC community. To me it looks like it
was, up-till now, a deserted step-child. (Though Jesse Keating
suggestion is a step in the right direction.)

Gilboa