plans for long term support releases?

[Thomas M Steenholdt]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
These are valid points.
I do think, however, that a lot if the people who will be installing the 
server spin of fedora would like the additional package stability. 
Certainly users *new* to Fedora would *expect* a server spin to have 
some other properties besides a specific package selection. Longer 
lifespan for example.

I've heard mention so many times, that it's a problem, people don't see 
Fedora as a serious distribution for non-desktop/-testing use. I think 
that this is exactly the problem. We want to be bleeding edge, but at 
the same time it would be nice if an installed version could be trusted 
to not break too often because of updates.

This is why I suggested an more stable (in terms of changes) LTS spin, 
perhaps, for every 2-4 normal Fedora releases, to provide a Fedora that 
could actually be used in these situations. (i know it is the way it is 
for a reason, so this is in no way an attempt to bad-mouth Fedora as it 
is. It's meant as a suggestion for further improvement). I also realize 
that providing such a release would be very much like RHEL and CentOS, 
but I got the impression that we were starting to open up and become 
more than the fast-rolling testbed distro that will be snapshot and 
stabilized into RHEL, in which case something like this could help us to 
reach more users/uses for Fedora.

I think it could be great to have, and we could easily scope it to 
become doable. One LTS is released on F#/4 - so Fedora 8 could be 
branched into Fedora 8 LTS and recieve a lifespan of security-fixes only 
for three years or something. Again, these are only suggestions.

/Thomas