[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Kevin Kofler]

Les Mikesell <lesmikesell <at> gmail.com> writes:
> user's perspective the approach was always wrong anyway.  It would be 
> good for both RHEL and fedora if they didn't really branch within a 
> version - that is, at some point the RH betas take over the 
> corresponding fedora release and fedora takes its wild and crazy changes 
> to a new release.

Look, what you're asking for is really impossible:

1. There is no way RHEL will branch from a near-EOL or EOL Fedora release just 
so you can safely upgrade from that version to RHEL. It would mean throwing out 
at least a year of development and going back to old stuff, and RHEL would ship 
with very outdated software (there are *already* complaints about its software 
being outdated, but that's unavoidable due to stabilization/QA and 
certification, but users would not tolerate even older software, they'd use a 
competitor with newer software). It would also not help those who already 
upgraded to a newer Fedora release.

2. There is also no way Fedora will stop pushing version upgrades to the 
releases RHEL gets branched from, that's not how Fedora works. Fedora is about 
bringing current software to our users and version upgrades are part of that. 
There are also several cases where backporting security fixes is much harder 
than just upgrading to a new version. It would also affect not just the version 
RHEL gets branched from, but the previous version (or even 2 versions below if 
it's the first month after a release) too, for obvious upgrade path reasons. 
And many Fedora users would see a move like that as RH perverting Fedora for 
their own purposes.

So Fedora will always have at least some packages which are newer than the RHEL 
versions at any point in time, and thus it is impossible to guarantee an 
upgrade path in that direction.

> Even so, some people claim to have done successful upgrades from fedora 
> to the corresponding EL/Centos with just a few quirks that probably 
> could have been avoided with a little central planning.

No amount of planning is going to avoid the fundamental impossibility outlined 
above. The upgrades you mention were either from long-EOL Fedora releases (that 
can work out, but it means months or even years without security updates!) or 
involved downgrading several packages (e.g. the kernel).

> That is, even if it is impossible to coordinate the changes that lead to
> RHEL/Centos, there should be a way to have the final fedora update do a clean 
> conversion - or at least better than most users could do on their own.

Even if you think there should be a way, the fact is that there is none.

         Kevin Kofler