Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
But the first question should be why a separate community is necessary. Why
is it not possible for one of fedora's goals to be to provide a clean
transition to RHEL or Centos at the end of certain development cycles, at
which point EPEL/Rpmfusion, etc. would be unnecessary as separate entities
since that fedora cycle's repository would be directly usable as-is and
would simply need to be maintained instead of the various 3rd party versions
that have been necessary to fill this void?
It would take a change in the branching of EL from Fedora. In the
past, EL's product cycle has required that it be branched on its
timeline NOT fedora's.
And now? I don't think fedora is a suitable starting point for a
server OS so perhaps things will change for other reasons. From a
user's perspective the approach was always wrong anyway. It would be
good for both RHEL and fedora if they didn't really branch within a
version - that is, at some point the RH betas take over the
corresponding fedora release and fedora takes its wild and crazy changes
to a new release.
So if Fedora is late, then the branch is taken
anyway and people start working on that to meet the EL roadmap. Thus
EL-3 is branched not from RH-9 but RH-9 beta. EL-4 is branched from
FC-3 beta ad EL-5 FC-6 beta.
Even so, some people claim to have done successful upgrades from fedora
to the corresponding EL/Centos with just a few quirks that probably
could have been avoided with a little central planning. That is, even
if it is impossible to coordinate the changes that lead to RHEL/Centos,
there should be a way to have the final fedora update do a clean
conversion - or at least better than most users could do on their own.
Because packages are pushed into a release that hae major changes
(FC-6 final and RHEL-5 are very different in various packages so you
have to be careful getting some stuff moved over.) For the branching
to work it would need to be done at the END of a cycle. So instead of
RHEL-6 being based off of Fedora-11 it would need to be based off of
Fedora-8 when mainline does not make changes to it anymore.
The question isn't so much whether it is easy or not, it is whether
thousands of people should have to figure out on their own how to make
this transition when fedora abandons their support or whether it should
be planned and automatic. The harder it is, the more critical it is to
have it planned once and designed to be repeatable. Personally I don't
think 'long term fedora support' makes a bit of sense in terms of
maintaining an update repository for years that is incompatible with,
but only slightly different from RHEL or Centos, but neither does
abandoning the community of users that developed around a fedora release
and now needs a way to put their work into production. It also doesn't
make much sense for EPEL to be something different than the final
version of the fedora release that becomes the enterprise version plus
ongoing updates.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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