long term support release

[Horst H. von Brand]

David Mansfield <fedora at dm.cobite.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 20:24 -0800, Andrew Farris wrote:
> > David Mansfield wrote:
> > > I'm fairly new to this list so if this is flame-bait, then I apologize.
> > > I was wondering whether there is any possibility of having the
> > > occasional 'long term support' (LTS) release of Fedora (say one every
> > > two years or something) so that users can settle down with the distro
> > > and actually become productive with it.  
> > > 
> > > Say the LTS cycle is one release every two years (every fourth Fedora
> > > release), and that the 'long term' for support only lasts for two years
> > > (which is pretty short to use the term long for, I realize), then there
> > > would only be one LTS release, and also the most current release to
> > > worry about at any given time.
> > > 
> > > If there is simply not enough teampower to do this, then that's
> > > understood.

> > That is essentially what was tried with the fedora legacy project
> > (supporting eol fedora releases for a longer term) but there was not
> > enough interest and support to keep it going.  It did support RH9 and
> > FC releases up to FC5 I think?

> Almost the same.  A few differences:
> - that project was 'glued on' to an existing process instead of a part
> of it

No... it was one of the projects of the (not-RedHat) Fedora almost from the
start. They supported pre-Fedora Red Hats.

> - they came into the game with a number of releases to support already

True.

> - they wanted to support every release

The idea was to support only those versions where interest was high enough
to support the longer term maintenance. Each version had its fans, but none
had enough longer term interest (say, more than 6 months after official
EOL) to keep them going. Perhaps the latest Red Hat (9) had a bit more, but
I suspect that had more to do with the name change than any objective
reason.

> I think Fedora LTS would be:
> - planned and built into the Fedora cycle and finally implemented
> - only releases planned in advance to be LTS releases would be LTS
> - there would only be one (or two) outstanding LTS releases at a time

As was offered, propose a SIG and gather people (lots of them!) to do the
(hard, non-glamorous) work.

O just go with RHEL/CentOS.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile               Fax:  +56 32 2797513