plans for long term support releases?

[Zing]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:26:02 +0100, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote:

> 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

I think there is nothing wrong with your ideas Thomas, but the problem is
one of leadership, manpower, and resources.  I think it's pretty clear
that while @redhat.com won't get in the way of a Fedora "LTS" type
release, it's certainly not going to throw resources into it.. they have
RHEL for that.  So it's really left up to the community to drive it
through to fruition.  And that's a stickler.  A real life one.

Also, when I think of an LTS type of releases, I think of critical
bug-fixes too, not just security fixes.  Can the fedora community
realistically come up with knowledgeable people for
kernel/glibc/gcc/lvm/xen/etc... I know I don't have the indepth
knowledge to confidently make kernel backport fixes.

So, I guess, at the end of the day, the people who really needed the above
"moved on" so to speak.  Maybe because of lack of leadership?  Who
knows.  In the future maybe we can clone jesse keating and then we can
have our cake and eat it too.