Feature proposal: Extended Life Cycle Support

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

On Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:13:14 +0200, Julian Aloofi
<julian.fedoralists at googlemail.com> wrote:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Extended_Life_Cycle reads:
>> Say a desktop environment runs Fedora 9 today, then within a month
>> after Fedora 11 is released, the user can choose to either upgrade to
>> Fedora 10 (N+1), or Fedora 11 (N+2). This is not considered a suitable
>> amount of time for corporate desktop environments, where projects need
>> to be defined, testing needs to be performed, resources have to be
>> alocated, etc, before any of the actual work can be done.
> 
> To be honest, I think environments that work like that won't use Fedora
> anyway if it wasn't supported for at least three, let's say two and a
> half, years.

Having to agree with your general statement -not necessarily the exact
period- I think neither of us can commit to extending even a single
release's life cycle to that extent right now. We'll have to start
somewhere, as you'll agree, and so we're thinking of starting out here; 3
releases to maintain in parallel, for those that opt-in, excluding EPEL
(which has long term support in all it's aspects already).

> People hate work, and it would be a lot of work to maintain 5 or even
> six parallel versions of Fedora. Maybe something like a Fedora LTS
> version is more likely to be a success.

While of course we'd never call it LTS, and while LTS has a very much
different value proposition then what is in the current proposal (LTS is
just too hard to start with at this moment), the 13 months we have now is
most definitely not suitable for corporate environments.

Whether 6 months of additional availability of security updates is going to
help, and to what extend, we'll have to see. Compared to the current
situation, that'll give an environment 7 months to upgrade beyond the
moment that we now call End-Of-Life for a given release and 3 releases to
choose from -certainly a lot more time then 1 month and 2 releases to
choose from.

I doubt whether the first six months will meet it's full potential in terms
of success since the feature will need to be known to consumers, and just
having it available does not make environments use Fedora all of a sudden.
That too needs time to settle.

Also, I should mention that in my experience, businesses that do choose
Fedora despite the requirement of one upgrade per year, tend to upgrade
within month 7-9 of a given release as long as you give them the full
details on how to make it easier on themselves; (Revisor, optional) ->
Cobbler -> Puppet.

> But hey, I like the idea behind it, let's see how it develops.

Thanks ;-) I'm sure this will be continued ;-)

-- Jeroen