reviving Fedora Legacy

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 16:49 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Patrice Dumas (pertusus at free.fr) said: 
> > > Yes. There's the defined release lifespan; anything of consequence
> > > will be maintained for that period.
> > 
> > You can say that but cannot give any guarantee.
> 
> On the contrary. The Fedora project provides maintenance of the release
> for the release period. You're guaranteeing ... nothing.
> 
> > > Neither is upgrading from TurboGears to Ruby on Rails and having your app
> > > work. If you started off by choosing the wrong tool, why would you expect
> > > an upgrade to something different to work? 
> > 
> > I know about users for which Centos/RHEL is not right because it is too
> > old,
> 
> ... but then later want a longer term of support, up to 3-5 years, during
> which... their OS will be old. Just as old as an equivalent RHEL/CentOS,
> in fact.
> 
> > technology preview in production environment and are willing to do some
> > testing and help with bugs, hence would have choosen fedora, but cannot
> > if they have to update each year.
> 
> I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't a straw horse that's being beaten to
> death.
> 
> Fedora 8's been out less a year. It has, in that timeframe, received *over
> 4600 updates*. Fedora 9 has received over 2600 in its current lifetime.
> 
> How is upgrading to the next release really that many orders of magnitude
> more change than this?
> 
> After all, if you're on F9 you've already consumed a KDE-4.0 to KDE-4.1
> update, for example. Or kernel updates from 2.6.25 through to 2.6.27.
> Or NetworkManager updates to the current version. Or ... <insert
> changes here>...

The expectations people will undoubtedly have from this sort of extended
release maintenance will be completely out of line with what's provided.
How can you provide security updates for some of a distribution and have
it be meaningful?  What does it matter if you patch a problem in a user
application and not those in the kernel?  And how do you reconcile that
disparity with the expectations of the user of this supposedly
maintained branch, who thinks that somehow they're doing better
security-wise than if they move to a platform actively maintained by a
community, be it a current Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS?

-- 
Paul W. Frields
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  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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