long term support release

[Horst H. von Brand]

David Mansfield <fedora at dm.cobite.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 19:25 -0800, Sean Bruno wrote:

[...]

> > To be honest, that's more or less what RHEL and the free rebuild CentOS
> > are.  

> > Fedora is a sandbox of sorts.  It's a place where applications come
> > together and sometimes, where they come to die.  :)

> I use RHEL/CentOS extensively at work (versions 3, 4 and 5), and I'd
> have to disagree about that.  Tons of the 'cool' stuff that's in fedora
> gets left out of RHEL/CentOS.

Have you looked at EPEL? Much cool Fedora stuff ends up there. And if not,
grabbing the SRPM and rebuilding is not /that/ hard either...

>                               I don't know who decides what 'makes the
> cut' for RHEL, but it certainly isn't the Fedora team. 

Small wonder... that is in the hands of the RHEL team ;-)

> For example, gnumeric and git, both 'everyday' tools, are missing from
> CentOS 5, AFAIK, but I'm talking about tons of other goodies.  The RHEL
> package selection process is too restrictive it would seem.

RHEL is for production use, has to be rock-solid. Implies long-time
commitment to the (minimalistic) package set shipped (even longer than the
lifetime of a particular version). Fedora is bleeding edge, for adventurous
users. "The kitchen sink and then some" is acceptable, as is "Oops, this
didn't work out too well, let's try another approach/package in
paralell/next time".


> And I'm not really complaining about that.  I think RHEL hits the target
> exactly and I don't want it to change, but it's not a real recreational
> desktop system, never was, never(?) will be.  It's a server os and
> possibly business 'productivity' desktop os.

Yep.

> Plus, by having an LTS release, it would encourage the value-add
> packagers like livna and rpmforge to get on the bandwagon, and 'go long'
> as well, so it would be possible to have a multimedia enabled system
> that lasts more than 6 months. 

Fedora is about /freely distributable/ software, making it easier for
"others" to give you the tools to break the law isn't in Fedora's charter
(quite the contrary).
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
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