On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 02:46 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote: > From what I recall, the general plan with Fedora Core all along has > been to maintain one OS release, however ending the maintenance of > Fedora Core 3 as soon as Fedora Core 4 comes out, or ending Fedora > Core 4 maintenance as soon as Fedora Core 5 is released, would have > the effect of immediately requiring all users to upgrade to the new > release on release day or end up using a system that is no longer > updated. > > Since it was desired that there be a time window to let people do > the upgrade, rather than have to do it immediately, some maintenance > overlap of 3 months was added to the initial plan. This would give > the general 6 month per release goal a 3 month overlap, or 9 months > total for the life of any given Fedora Core OS release. > > However, it was also part of the plan that the 6 month release > cycles wouldn't be carved in stone, but could slide ahead or > backward in time for various reasons if we felt there were good > enough benefits to the project to hold back on a release a bit > longer, or push one out sooner. So instead of making the policy > be "maintenance for 9 months", it became maintenance for one > OS release plus the time during the next development cycle up > to test2. ie: Release N is maintained until release N+2 test2. > > In other words, Fedora Core 3, is maintained until Fedora Core 5 test2. > Or in even other words, users are expected to upgrade to each new > OS release as it comes out if they want to keep their systems running > "maintained" software, however when a new OS release comes out, they > have a window of time that their existing OS will continue to be > maintained which is approximately 3 months, but which might be slightly > shorter or longer depending on the development schedule of the next > OS release after that. > > The concept of Fedora Legacy however, is to enable the community to > maintain the OS releases indefinitely if there is such a desire and > motivation in the community to see that happen. > > The Fedora Legacy project just recently released a large update which > had hundreds of packages in it for Fedora Core 1, and I presume for > Fedora Core 2 as well. As long as there are enough people in the > community using the older OS releases, there are likely to be a > percentage of them who are developers or package maintainers who are > willing to contribute to Fedora Legacy. > > I believe the current scheme is as it should be, and if anything, we > should shorten the maintenance time on Fedora Core releases and transfer > the maintenance of the older OS release to Legacy at the test1 phase, > to enable developers to have more time to spend developing the current > release. > > I accept that FC dev simply do not have the resources required to sustain two releases. But as I said in another post, my problem is not with the actual hand-over to FC-L, but with the manual intervention required by the user/admin in-order to reconfigure the machine to use FC-L. I fear that most unsuspecting/unexperienced users will fail to see the hand-over message, and even if they do, they won't know how to use FC-L, leaving their machines open to attacks. To me, FC4 was somewhat of a mixed bag. While I'm using on all my workstations, all my servers remained FC3. More-ever, all the people I switched to Linux still use FC3. (For the same reason). This being, I'm now faced with the need to visit each machine and configure it to use FC-L. /Not/ what I call fun :( FC-L should become a true member of FC community. To me it looks like it was, up-till now, a deserted step-child. (Though Jesse Keating suggestion is a step in the right direction.) Gilboa -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
