Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

[Les Mikesell]

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 01:08:31PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> And what is your guess on the time it would take for a lawsuit threat if 
>> someone actually did provide a Fedora-labeled distribution that didn't 
>> meet Fedora policies?
> 
> I don't see the relevance of that question. If it doesn't follow Fedora policy
> it isn't Fedora. It's another Fedora based distro with a longer lifetime.
> 
> Nothing to do with whether it can be done, and if it works well then maybe
> it'll later become an official bit of Fedora.
> 
> The other way I can read you email is "I want to use the Fedora name for my own
> purposes and do as I like so screw you all", which I hope is not the intent you
> want to convey.

It's more like "Fedora would have to change before I would find it 
useful for any purpose", which I guess is only slightly different.  Or 
at least any purpose other than a preview of what the next RHEL might 
contain and even that hasn't looked too promising lately.

But as far as making usably stable versions, there are a couple of 
approaches that would avoid wasting a lot of resources.  One is to plan 
a smooth transition into the next Centos via yum update to end up with a 
real long term supported system without duplicating any work on 
backported updates.  Another which isn't really a long-term approach but 
could produce usably-stable versions that overlapped a bit would be to 
stop introducing new features in updates in one release by or before the 
beta of the next release and focus only on stability from that point to 
end of life.  Even if EOL is not extended you'd have a version that you 
could run until the next version reached that point - and people who 
want new features can jump to the next release instead.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com