Chris Tyler wrote:
On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 21:13 -0500, Mike Chalmers wrote:
I do not understand how Fedora expects you to upgrade or reinstall
every 6 months or so.
This is just not right.
Should a distro keep continuing to make you install every six months,
if so, I would rather use Microsoft. Why not provide updates, major
ones, to the already installed OS instead of having to reinstall a new
OS!!! I imagine that this, if done in an organized way, could be
easier on the developers of Fedora.
INSTEAD OF MAKING CONSUMERS INSTALL EVERY SIX MONTHS OR UNTIL THE
UPDATES STOP, JUST PROVIDE LARGE UPDATES THAT UPGRADE A SYSTEM WITHOUT
HAVING TO DO A COMPLETELY NEW INSTALL???
THEN YOU WILL HAVE A LARGER FAN BASE AND A MORE STABLE OS!!!
Hi Mike,
There's a few things to note:
- Updates are available for 2 releases plus one month. You can update
once a year and stay current with Fedora.
- The "preupgrade" package enables you to upgrade from one Fedora
release to another without reinstalling (though your mileage may vary).
Indeed, it depends on your hardware, if the drivers have been changed some
"improvement" maps to "eats the files" or "no visible display" instead. In other
words, backup before trying.
- For long-term support, there's RHEL and CentOS (both are based on
Fedora technology) -- you can reinstall just twice a decade.
- Releasing every 6 months helps Fedora fulfill its goal of driving the
rapid development of open source.
And there I do want to say the support for the oldest supported version often
seems to be limited to bug fix. If a new version of an application comes out it
is less likely to make it to, currently, FC9 than FC10, depending on what it is.
Now that the FC11 alpha is out, I expect damn few resources for FC9, which is
just getting really stable and getting 3rd party applications ported.
I would love to see some concept of LTS in Fedora, or some policy like "updates
to new versions for six months (next release), bug fixes for a year after that.
Not the LTS of Fedora Unity days, but I know resources are scarce, although
honestly I have some drivers and such which just allowed an update from FC6 to
FC9, and some long term love would be great.
My solution has been to run some machines in a VM, to protect them from newer
threats while still being able to use features which are necessary and not
available in newer versions. Perhaps that will help the O.P. run stable machines
longer while having newer features available.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
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