My last words on the subject...
The RH9 GA Release, as far as I can tell, was 03/31/03. Putting RH's
timeline for life-cycle, maintenance should be carried on for a
minimum of 5 years.
I think this is probably unreasonable, as the team's resources are
limited, which is why we're having this discussion.
However, as Eric wrote, there are complex production systems that are
running RH9, and the pain of upgrading these to the 2.6 kernel, these
systems may not be able to make that leap. This bar is going to be
hit with other distro's as well, including the RHEL clones.
The only alternative for RH9 users is to migrate outside of the
direct RH family, and this is bad karma for us...
The expectations with Fedora Core were pretty clear, release early
and often. We've been very clear with maintenance time line on these
releases, specifically that Fedora is not forever :^)
RH9 was different in that it was a commercial release, one that folks
could purchase in a box with support, etc... the key problem is that
RH terminated support very early and abruptly on RH9 as compared to
the other RH commercial releases. Suggestion, create a sub-team that
supports RH9 exclusively. Remember, we're not implementing new
features etc... it's security patches only. We commit to RH9
maintenance through 04/01/07, and then put it to bed. Make it very
clear to RH9 users that the end is coming. Nine months is fair warning.
As for 7.x, it's my opinion that most people know that it is a very
old release, and it's not reasonable to expect further support.
Lastly, folks need to go and look at the Fedora Legacy front page.
We're still telling RH7.2/RH8 users to go to RH7.3 and RH9. Since
we're contemplating EOL of support for these releases, we need to
stop telling people to migrate to them.
Tim
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