Fedora lifetime and stability

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 10:41 +0200, Gilboa Davara wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 07:32 -0800, Serguei Miridonov wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I have some remarks about Fedora lifetime and stability which 
> > are very important for general users. Now and in the past 
> > there were some issues with Fedora upgrades which turned life 
> > into nightmare when instead of doing normal work users had to 
> > fight with bugs, sending reports, waiting fixes, etc.
> > 
> > I think that it might be a good idea to increase the time 
> > between Fedora releases and/or make the lifetime of every 
> > release at least 2-3 years.
> > 
> > However, before starting a discussion about this I would like 
> > to ask, if this topic was discussed earlier. I'm sure it was 
> > but can somebody point me any deep analysis which really 
> > proves that current one year lifetime and half-year release 
> > period is the best for Fedora?
> > 
> > Thank you in advance.
> > 
> > Serguei.
> > 
> 
> No deep analysis required:
> Short term support (1 year), bleeding edge: Fedora.
> Long term support (7 years), slow moving: RHEL (and CentOS).
> 
> - Gilboa

Let me try and explain myself.
You cannot have a stable platform that is also bleeding edge. 
As any software developer can tell you, software needs time to mature.
You need time to check everything, fix bugs, fix compatibility problems,
etc.

Ubuntu long term support is problematic. You get a semi-unstable release
that is slowly being stabilized as things progress. But until it fully
stabilizes, the software packages being used as just as old as
RHEL/CentOS ones.
... In essence, instead of having RedHat/CentOS do the QA for you (or
use Fedora to pre-test it), you are being used as Ubuntu's QA.

More-ever, in philosophical terms it's the difference between "need" and
"want".
A. I 'want' long term support because I hate upgrading my desktop.
B. I 'need' long term support because my company will lose 1M$ for each
hour our servers are down.

People who need A, will not pay for it and community projects that tried
to cater for this need (Fedora Legacy) failed to attract sufficient
man-power.
People who require B, will pay a lot of money for it, and be very pissed
if thing break.
Hence, RedHat is spending all of its resources on B.

- Gilboa