long term support release

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:24:25 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> >  Fedora LTS would compete with CentOS+EPEL and would lead
> > to even more mass-builds.
> 
> We are back to what IMO, this all obits around: questioning the
> "will" :/

Yes, I question the number of people with such a "will".

Because the situation has changed.

You cannot hope to win back any volunteers who have switched to CentOS,
where a lot is easier to do -- also with regard to trademark issues.
Updates can be copied from RHEL verbatim. You don't need to duplicate Red
Hat's security team. Instead, you simply rely on it. There are no promises
to fix bugs in CentOS until they are fixed in RHEL. CentOS is the road of
least resistance for community volunteers.

Fedora Legacy, on the other hand, was willing to sink its own ship while
still in the harbour. That made it even easier for volunteers to find an
excuse when wandering off, blaming the bureaucracy and insufficient
infrastructure. If as many hurdles as possible had been removed, only then
the project would have managed to find out whether there would have been
enough volunteers to increase the life-time of a few distributions for N
months and deal with every vulnerability in every package, also the big
ones. For RHL it was possible to copy/port patches from their
corresponding RHEL packages. For Fedora, you are in version upgrade hell.

Perhaps a dry-run with Fedora 6 or 7 would tell. Get somebody to find out
what security fixes would need to be published for those dists. This could
happen in parallel with building a SIG, filled with people with strong
interest in doing lots of thankless work and being held liable for
mistakes later on, too. I think you will find out that you would benefit
from or be in need of corporate backing (as not to duplicate a lot of
work).