Fedora Life Cycle

[jkeating]

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:53:22 -0700
Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the clarification, it's a good and fine point.
> 
> Therefore, the question out there is:  "Who will provide support for a
> Long Life Cycle (LLC) Fedora version?"
> 
> One choice is to try to convince the Project to extend the life cycle.
> That seems (to me) like a hard field to try to plow again; it's
> already plowed, planted, and producing good harvests.
> 
> Another choice is to add a parallel team that provides the LLC Fedora.
> It's like annexing the field next door and planting it in a new way.
> 
> If your goal is to have an LLC Fedora for whatever reason, I encourage
> you to focus on the second option.

Please keep in mind that id you want to do LLC Fedora, you're going to
have to do it for Every release.  That's the whole reason you want
Fedora, so you get newer software, etc... otherwise you'd take
RHEL/CentOS.  SO do some math.  We release every 6 months, keep a
release for 13 months.  That means at most we are doing updates for 3
releases.  N, N-1, and N-2.  That overlap is just one month though, and
the rest of the time it's just two releases.  Now, if you want LLC, for
say 2 years, you're going to be supporting N, N-1, N-2, N-3, N-4.  So
for a good chunk of time you're going to be managing updates for three
different Fedora releases, and all the software therein.  That's not a
small amount of software and that is not a small amount of releases.
It takes a /huge/ amount of effort to continually audit all of those
packages for even just security flaws let alone bugfixes and new
upstream releases, getting builds out and tested by somebody, and
getting them out to mirrors for users.

If you want to go further and say have a 3 year life span for each
Fedora release you get to add /another/ two Fedora releases to your
stable.  So 5 releases to watch at any time.

Hint, it takes Red Hat an enormous amount of engineering cost to watch
RHEL2.1 (critical security only), RHEL3 (soon to be if not already
critical only), RHEL4, and now RHEL5.  That's only 4, and a /much/
smaller software set.

Please don't underestimate the amount of work this is going to take,
and the amount of resistance you're going to find if you try to attach
the Fedora brand to any such effort.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project          (fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
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