plans for long term support releases?

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 16 January 2007 01:04, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:
> Now that Core and Extras are going to be merged and the distro is
> opening up to become even more (?) community driven, has anyone played
> with the though of eventually releasing a long term support version of
> Fedora?
>
> It could be a based on a staple snapshot of Fedora 7 + 4 months worth of
> updates or whatever, at this point I'm more interested in hearing about
> the idea than the details, which will surely follow, if i'm not the only
> one who think this could be a good idea. Especially now that we're going
> to do special server spins etc...
>
> Just a thought (hope this was not brought up ages ago and I just missed it)

There are a few things going against this.

A) Fedora is about new software.  Even in our released lines, we constantly 
upgrade to new software to fix bugs, rather than backport.  Would you try to 
change this philosophy in your extended release?

B) Fedora will now have a lifespan of 13~ months.  Anything more and you're 
dangerously close to a RHEL like product, or a RHEL spinoff like CentOS.  
These release every 18~ months, and are supported for 7~ years.  Wouldn't 
that make a better Long Term Support distribution?  Still based on Fedora...

C) Community participation.  We tried this once before with Legacy, folks 
weren't exactly beating down our doors to help out doing just security 
updates for say FC3/4.  That's when interest really dwindled.  Lots of people 
said "Sure, I'd love to get those updates, but I have no time/skill to help 
out."

D) Sheer volume.  The size of Core+Extras is staggering.  Trying to track just 
security issues across the entire thing is a full time job for at least one 
person.  Actually DOING anything about the security issues is probably 
another full time job.  Getting anybody to QA things is a joke, nobody wants 
to run test updates on their stable system.  All the fun QA happens out in 
rawhide land pre-release.  So you need maybe one or two full time QA folks 
with access to a multitude of hardware/software configurations.  If you don't 
do this for all software, surely you'll piss people off by not updating the 
software THEY care about.  It will happen.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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