long term support release

[Les Mikesell]

Horst H. von Brand wrote:

>>>> Upgrade to next Fedora. Gets easier each time around. A bit of foresight
>>>> when installing originally helps much here.
> 
>>> Precisely.  The update or upgrades are essentially very simple to
>>> handle when you've got a sane partitioning scheme setup.
> 
>> I _really_ have to believe that you haven't run fedora over any span
>> of time across a variety of hardware
> 
> I'm running Red Hat since Red Hat 3 or so, and then Fedora from 1. On an
> rather wide variety of machines (Alpha, SPARC and SPARC64, i386 to i686,
> x86_64, single/double/8x processor, ...). All the way as machines in a
> computer lab, day-to-day workstation, and servers.
> 
> And yes, upgrading used to be a pain, but is is getting easier all the time.

I'm not convinced this is a predictable trend.  You are pretty much at 
the mercy of kernel development, which I thought was more reasonable 
back in its days of having an experimental branch for the wild changes 
that get thrown directly into fedora these days.

>>                                     with an assortment of additional
>> software installed.
> 
> That I learned not to do in the RH 4-5 timeframe, especially not "self
> compiled from source". What limited stuff I have locally is packaged as
> self-built RPMs that I can update easily.

That doesn't matter a lot unless you are rolling it out across a lot of 
similar machines.  And you can't just avoid locally built stuff - it may 
be the whole purpose of the machine.  The hard part is finding the 
components you need to build in the first place that work together and 
with your new environment and you run into dependencies in strange 
places. For example, there's a forgotten machine under a desk somewhere 
in a Swiss office, set up by someone else years ago that no longer works 
there that has a CIPE vpn into the LAN in our office near Chicago.  If I 
upgrade the machine in our office to something current (instead of RH 
7.3 with a 4+ year uptime...), where am I going to find a working CIPE? 
Or for a simpler scenario, consider something that needs a few dozen 
perl modules that aren't in an RPM repository and may not all work 
together out of CPAN the day you need them.  Even if you built RPMs the 
last time around, you probably want updated versions and in fact may 
need them to work with the rest of the system.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com