long term support release

[Les Mikesell]

Andrew Farris wrote:
>> I was perfectly happy with RH 6.2, and most of what I do now I could do
>> there, so this can't really be an issue.
>>
>>>          A year passes and you've installed an assortment of
>>> additional apps and perhaps written some of your own.
>>
>> 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  with an assortment of additional 
software installed.

> Anyone running Fedora (and especially anyone testing updates or rawhide) 
> that does not have their home on a separate partition is nuts (or new to 
> that concept).  If you have /etc/ /root and /home where they can be 
> safely backed up and restored, then nuking your entire system for a 
> fresh install is a couple hours of work at best.
> 
> I just fail to see how anyone interested in running Fedora at all cannot 
> find a few hours every 6 months to handle that.

Some people might have better things to do - unless that's an offer to 
come over and do the upgrades for me if you really believe it's that 
easy.  The problem is that upgrades do not go smoothly, and if yours 
have so far it is a matter of luck. I've had disk controller drivers 
missing or broken, firewire access wildly unpredictable, and after 
finding hardware to move to, still had to spend days tracking down 
corresponding driver modules, perl modules, installing java, etc. to get 
back to where I was before.

Maybe it's just old fashioned, but I'd prefer that the computer work for 
me instead of the other way around.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com