Stability and Release Cycles - An Idea

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 12/23/2008 06:36 PM, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> Manuel Wolfshant <wolfy at nobugconsulting.ro> wrote:
>   
>> Alan Cox wrote:
>>     
>>> Alan
>>> [1] Seriously show me five people planning to contribute to this and I'm happy
>>> to sort out a corner in ftp.linux.org.uk.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> I am not much of a programmer any more (hence, without help from
>> someone more experienced,  backporting would probably be out of my
>> league ) but I would gladly contribute as a packaging monkey if
>> fedora-legacy would be revived. I still have RH 7.2, RH 7.2, FC1, FC2,
>> FC6 and FC7 in production, so from time to time I have to recompile
>> stuff anyway.
>>     
>
> Why not move on?
>   
Because they do their job just fine as they are. For instance my 
workstation in F7 behaves much better that a F-10 which fails to see 
it's DNS servers and 2-3 times a month I regret that I have installed F9 
instead of Centos 5 on the workstation used by my 70+ yrs old mother


>> Not to mention that very often I compile stuff from Fedora for Centos
>> 4 and 5
>>     
>
> Integrate in EPEL?
>   
When it makes sense and I have the time, I suggest the respective 
package maintainers to do that. Or I volunteer for co-maint. for EPEL 
branches. But sometimes my packages cannot be integrated in EPEL.
Generally speaking, I try to verify if any package I review is an EPEL 
candidate and/ or suggest the fixes needed (if / when I know how to, as 
I might have said in a previous life I was a programmer but a) I've 
never been a very good programmer b) I was using Borland C++ c) this 
happened a very long time ago).But I have compiled nedit for instance 
way before it landed in EPEL, it's one of the favorite editors in the 
company I work for and EL-5 missing it was a reason for many cryings and 
tears.
Anyway, I do not think that this thread should focus on EPEL, The 
problem from my point of view is "

Fedora 8 will be
end-of-life and no further updates, including security updates, will
be released at that time, and new builds will not be allowed in the buildsystem"

I fail to see why no update at all is a better policy than "we update what we can when we can, but we no longer officially support this vesion of the distribution. Please understand that you are in uncharted territory, we'll try to help as much as we can but you might be better by simply upgrading to a newer distro."