long term support release

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 17:37 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 01:23:37PM -0300, Horst H. von Brand wrote:
> > 
> > Now, cross your heart: Would /you/ run a LTS where there was /no/ QA or
> > security team? At most for a month or so, until it is convenient to
> > upgrade would be my answer. Feeling uneasy all the time.
> 
> Yes, I would, if I know that I can trust the packagers.
So would I. I have no reason trust the community less than anybody else.
Otherwise I also weren't using Fedora at all right now ;)

>  I don't care
> about QA and security team (though it is a nice bonus).
Well, Fedora 8 speaks a language of its own wrt. QA.

I definitely appreciate their efforts, but ... Patrice put it quite
nicely, it's a "nice bonus". 

No matter what they do, they can't compete with the QA provided through
user feedback and necessarily must fail in circumstances they don't
test. This kind of QA doesn't nicely fit into OSS development, it's
"closed source school".

>  I trust fedora
> contributors to do things right, though, when they are (even selfishely) 
> interested in something. And it could happen that some fedora contributors
> are interested in doing Updates after the EOL. Although I wouldn't
> certainly use such a release, if there was some infrastructure, I would
> certainly try to fix critical issues in most of my own packages in such 
> a setting (especially since I already do it in EPEL). I already do that
> for the stable releases I don't use, so...
Very similar to what I would do. 

I probably would use "Fedora LTS" for a "grace period" on systems which
still have "Fedora <N-2>" installed when it's being discontinued, and
when not being able to upgrade to "Fedora N" for whatever reasons.

Ralf