plans for long term support releases?

[Arjan van de Ven]

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.