Patrice Dumas (pertusus@xxxxxxx) said: > > On the contrary. The Fedora project provides maintenance of the release > > for the release period. You're guaranteeing ... nothing. > > It provides maintainance, but cannot guarantee anytihng. Be realistic. If we didn't de-facto guarantee that we'd provide security updates during the specified lifespan for all relevant packages, we woudn't have a viable distribution. > The idea is to > provide maintainance for the packages people are interested in providing > maintainance. I know exactly what you're proposing, you don't need to restate it. I just think it's a fundamentally bad idea that actively harms users by giving them an open-ended rope to hang themselves with, which doesn't at all claim to cover their entire system, as opposed to the clear support and maintenance they have now. To put it a different way - would you buy a car whose extended warranty won't tell you what it covers, or for how long, and tells you it's subject to change *AT ANY TIME*? If so, I think I've got some cars to sell you. You want me to support your plan? Cover the entire distribution, for a specified period of time. Simple, right? > > ... but then later want a longer term of support, up to 3-5 years, during > > which... their OS will be old. Just as old as an equivalent RHEL/CentOS, > > in fact. > > Not at all. Centos starts already old, it is very different. How so? When Centos 5/RHEL 5 is released, it's pretty much up to date, or at least within 6 months. If you're looking for a 3-5 year lifespan (which you said your goal is), that's nothing. And halfway or so through your proposed arrangement, your release would be just as old and outdated as an equivalent RHEL release of the same vintage. > > How is upgrading to the next release really that many orders of magnitude > > more change than this? > > It is very different because the updates are not fundamental changes, > like those that happens between releases. You know that, don't you, > those changes that goes through rawhide. ... how so? There's a ton of changes between kernel-2.6.25 and kernel-2.6.27. KDE-4.1 is a fairly big step from KDE-4.0. The entirety of system network configuration support was added between F8 GA NetworkManager and the F8 updates version. Is it *all* of the large changes? No. But it's more than you'd think. Moreover, exactly which of these big changes break people? Is rhgb -> plymouth a big change? Sure. Does it actively break third-party applications or development? No. Honestly, I think a whole lot more of the work here is best done: - promoting RHEL/CentOS as the alternative for users who need longer support - making distribution upgrades seamless and easy Bill -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
