On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 14:29 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 01:18:01PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote: > > > > I understand that there is a market for a Fedora-based distribution > > which doesn't receive megabytes of updates each week, and which is > > supported for longer than a year. > > What have been proposed so far doesn't solve the 'which doesn't receive > megabytes of updates each week' part, only the 'supported for longer > than a year' part. > > > What I _don't_ understand is why these requirements are not met by > > CentOS. Isn't that _precisely_ the 'market' that RHEL and CentOS exist > > to serve? > > Because it is not the same as you stress yourself. Centos is clearly not > the same than 'Fedora-based distribution which is supported for longer > than a year'. It allows to use innovative technologies while not being > forced to update each year. This is the part I have difficulty understanding. You want to use new and innovative technologies, but you don't want to update your nice stable system? Do you want a perpetual motion machine with that too? You're right -- you are offered updates, or you are offered stability, and there isn't much of a middle ground. But that's just reality. > > As I see it, there is a continuum of sorts -- from the daily churn of > > rawhide, through the less anarchic but still considerable churn of the > > latest Fedora release (currently F9), to the more conservative set of > > updates for the previous release (F8), and then a bit of a jump to the > > long-term stagnation¹ of RHEL/CentOS. You can pick whichever one you > > like, according to your needs. > > The last jump is not realistic in all cases. What should F6 user jump > to? Centos 5? Centos 6? And F8 users? F6 is basically RHEL4/CentOS 4 for the most part, isn't it? And F8 would probably be closest to RHEL5/CentOS 5. > The proposal is not to create a new distribution, but simply have > EOLed branches acl removed and leave the possibility to build and push > the results, with a limitation of the changes to grave bug fixes and > security issues. So no new innovation then? And you'd want to do this for _every_ six-monthly release of Fedora? Surely that's a whole boatload of effort you don't need? Why not just do it for every other release? Or, perhaps more usefully, every third release -- a new one about every 18 months? I see no fundamental reason why we should _forbid_ people from doing security updates for packages in EOL distributions, although I'm very wary of the expectations that it would create. If we ship official-looking updates for _some_ security bugs, naïve users will quite reasonably expect that they'll be receiving updates for _all_ serious security bugs, and our "You are unsupported; you need to upgrade before you get hacked" message will be compromised. I also think that with a niche market that small, between Fedora and CentOS, you are unlikely to get enough volunteers to keep it viable -- isn't that what happened with Fedora Legacy last time? > (That being said, it is also possible that 'which doesn't receive > megabytes of updates each week' issue may deserve to be looked at, but > it is a different issue). That and/or ensuring that the packages you miss in CentOS are actually in EPEL. -- David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre David.Woodhouse@xxxxxxxxx Intel Corporation -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
