long term support release

[Jeremy Katz]

On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 10:59 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > 
> >> And why aren't those reasons satisfied with RHEL/CentOS which doesn't
> >> have these problems?
> > For me, CentOS is an ultra conservative, stagnating distro not meeting
> > my demands. It may-be suitable for those who want to set up a server and
> > run it with minimal support for the next 4 years - To me it's non
> > interesting.
> 
> I don't think a kernel or libc should be "interesting" and the only 
> reason to change them should be to get one that works with new hardware. 
>    Server apps also tend to be mostly feature-complete even in old 
> versions.  However desktop apps are evolving rapidly and there really is 
> a missing spot in fedora/rhel style distributions since nothing provides 
> both kernel/core library stability and current application versions.

Unfortunately as the desktop grows increasingly full-featured, the
amount of the stack which needs to change for supporting newer desktop
apps is increasing.

Once upon a time (... in a galaxy far, far away) I used to build updated
GNOME versions for older Red Hat Linux releases.  It wasn't easy, but it
was pretty constrained to a small set of packages.  These days, I'd end
up needing new hal which brings in ConsoleKit which ...[1]

Jeremy

[1] Note: this is an example.  I am not saying this is bad.  Hi
davidz! :)