long term support release

[Andrew Farris]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> 2008/1/23 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
>> On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:50:53 -0500
>> Chuck Anderson <cra at WPI.EDU> wrote:
>>
>>> Not really.  You have to wait ~6 months for the newest release to
>>> stabalize before upgrading to it, so that cuts down the maintained
>>> lifetime to only 6 months.
>> This is ridiculous BS that is self serving.  If everybody waited until
>> release+6M to try it out, the "safe" date would become release+12M, and
>> so on.  It's entirely a piss poor attitude and does nothing to better
>> the project.
>>
> 
> Well in a large scale enterprise setting it could be 6 months BUT NOT
> because of stability issues on Fedora side. Documenting, coming up
> with security plans, support procedures for internal help desk,
> testing that software works with internal applications etc usually
> took us 2 months on EL with a lot of stuff 'fluffed' over as done by
> upstream. In a Fedora setting it took a lot longer as we couldn't say
> that there was a commercial entity doing that testing for us. Of
> course that would also mean that the packages that came out for Fedora
> 8 would only get backported fixes etc versus getting updates to the
> latest and greatest.

Which is a prime example of why its not *targeted as* a distribution for that 
use.  Fedora is a showcase of advancing technologies in the linux space, thats 
what it is, a distribution for developers and innovators.  With that 
understanding firmly set in place it makes sense that reviewing it for an 
enterprise setting would take longer.

Alot of people lose sight of what Fedora is I think (and this is not about your 
comments Stephen); it is a good distro for desktop use *only because* it 
showcases the newest improvements in UI, features, and capabilities.. making 
sure it competes^w out performs the windows space in usability and features. 
Fedora is not meant to be everybody's best desktop all the time, and alot of the 
complaints about the release cycle and 'alpha'ness of some software included 
stem directly from the assumption that Fedora is meant to be rock solid 
workhorse for people who don't want to pay for RHEL.

-- 
Andrew Farris <lordmorgul at gmail.com> <ajfarris at gmail.com>
  gpg 0xC99B1DF3 fingerprint CDEC 6FAD BA27 40DF 707E A2E0 F0F6 E622 C99B 1DF3
No one now has, and no one will ever again get, the big picture. - Daniel Geer
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