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

[Rahul Sundaram]

[Not speaking on behalf of Red Hat or Fedora Foundation]

Gilboa Davara wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I've been following a very interesting discussion in fedora-list about
>the recent transfer of FC3 to Fedora Legacy.
>
>Following Rahul's suggestion, I'm starting this discussion in -devel.
>  
>
Thank for you stepping up to post a development concern to the 
development list (that is obvious to me but apparently not to many others)

>I'm asking the FC foundation to consider the following:
>
>1. Fedora's policy dictates that old releases (Current - 2) will be
>retired once the new release hits Test2. This policy has one glaring
>drawback: User that seek an upgrade can either (1) install a mid-life
>release (FC4 in this case) or (2) install a beta release. (FC5 Test2 in
>this case).
>
>This being I suspect that most users will play the waiting game before
>making a decision. They'll wait for the FC5 release and check how it
>behaves before making a decision, which in turn, will leave them
>vulnerable to security exploits.
>
>Extending the life of FC4 by (a mere?) ~2 months, will give FC4 users
>seeking an upgrade a chance to make an informed decision based upon how
>FC6 behaves, without leaving them open to security risks.
>
>2. It has been suggested (in the fedora-list discussion) that the last
>official FC4 update will be a legacy yum configuration rpm that will
>ease/automate the transition to legacy. This sounds like a great idea to
>me. Is it possible?
>
>  
>
Note that Fedora Core 3 release updates maintained by Red Hat has 
already been extended for a few months.  Red Hat has been maintaining 
updates on Fedora Core 3 for an year and two months as opposed to 
elevent months of updates for Fedora Core 2 due to prolonged development 
release cycle of Fedora Core 5. So its not a question of extending the 
release cycle for Red Hat but managing two releases in additional to 
working on  the development code for the next subsequent major release 
along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux development and maintenance. We 
could even shorten the development time on the subsequent release and 
thereby reducing the time spend by Red Hat spends on older release. This 
is in effect does what you request but results in a even shorter amount 
of updates provided by Red Hat for any given release of Fedora Core. In 
my opinion that is not desirable.

What are users really concerned about?. Are they concerned about 
receiving continuous updates from the Fedora Project or the quality of 
the Fedora Legacy updates?. I have been completed defeated in my attempt 
to get the answers from fedora-list on this one or maybe I am being too 
thick. If it is just the idea of continuously providing updates by 
enabling a smooth transition, I am very much in favor of providing a 
legacy repository enabled by default or pushing a yum update that 
enables it just before the transition of a release from core to legacy. 
Since users are already trusting community members to do good quality 
packaging work in Fedora Extras I dont see a single reason not to do 
this for legacy.  On the other hand, if the users are concerned about 
the quality of the updates from Fedora legacy project, the answer is not 
adding additional burden of release cycle maintenance to Red Hat but 
stepping up to improve the QA and packaging work done within legacy.

You can find information on contributing to Fedora Legacy at 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legacy

Hope that helps.

-- 
Rahul 

Fedora Bug Triaging - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers