long term support release

[Naheem Zaffar]

On 25/01/2008, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
> Until someone comes up with a sound plan for an LTS deliverable that
> communicates expectations on quality, I don't see a reason to just
> open up the trees for random people to update random packages whenever
> they want to.

Talking as end user (who will always like to be on the latest release
-so not only is this), would it not be possible to have some natural
limit to a releases life?

Something like:

Standard support - what we get now. Around 13 months depending on releases.
+ Reactive support - an additional time period where the community is
willing to provide updates to key packages using the same structure
for the standard updates. For this there MUST be a community member
willing to provide updates for the key packages - even if it @RH for
supported releases.

Key packages to be covered should be kernel,  SElinux, Firefox and a
few other packages, probably server related such as apache as they
will probably need the longer release cycles. As long as there is
support for each and everyone of these key packages, the release
should be supported. As soon as even one is dropped, the release is
EOL.

For this you will probably need to allow packages to be orphaned per release.

There may be a need to limit which releases will follow this structure
 and have a maximum life span too.

A good proposal or total crack?