On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 07:04 +0100, Thomas M Steenholdt wrote: > Now that Core and Extras are going to be merged and the distro is > opening up to become even more (?) community driven, has anyone played > with the though of eventually releasing a long term support version of > Fedora? > > It could be a based on a staple snapshot of Fedora 7 + 4 months worth of > updates or whatever, at this point I'm more interested in hearing about > the idea than the details, which will surely follow, if i'm not the only > one who think this could be a good idea. Especially now that we're going > to do special server spins etc... > > Just a thought (hope this was not brought up ages ago and I just missed it) so one question: how many packages are YOU willing to be the person for that keeps up with the security stuff? (it should be packages you're familiar with since security backports are generally quite hard, and incrementally harder the older the package).... if the answer is "eh none" then you are giving the same answer a LOT of people do. THere's nothing wrong with that per se, but there IS something wrong with the "but I want other people to do it for me. For free. Without even saying thanks". Fedora Legacy may have had it's faults, but there is also a fundamental contradiction in it. A lot of people like fedora for it's latest stuff. And there's people who just want a distro stable and keep using it. The first group generally moves to a new FC release within 3 months after it being released. Fair enough, and this is actually quite a really large group. Even in the RHL days (with 2+ years of support), 90% of the users moved to a new release within that timeframe. The other 10% wants things to "just work", and this is pretty much the exact same crowd who only want stable tested packages. So.. your testing base for updates is... exactly zero. (This problem isn't unique to fedora. For example the 2.4 kernel series has exactly this same problem; nobody who still uses 2.4 wants to test prereleases) What is worse, usually developers (either upstream coders or package maintainers) do not fall in this 10%, they are more in the 90% by *far*. And for the part they're in the 10%, they don't want those systems unstable/testing either... My conclusion on this (and I've been outside a distro for a while now, looking at the entire ecosystem from a distance) is that you either 1) have people paid to do the work or 2) have longer release cycles (with one in development and one in maintenance) debian follows the 2) model.. RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu the 1) model. Thing is... if I ask YOU the question, how many dollars are you willing to pay for 6 extra months of maintenance, I can guess the answer with a dollar or two :) Note that this includes QA; without QA this entire thing is worthless, since if update packages break more than once for the 10% that cares, they will yell, scream and claim the long term support effectively is worthless and doesn't exist anyway. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
