long term support release

[Horst H. von Brand]

Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> I believe the CentOS team has made some effort to isolate/generalize
> the 'rebranding' work they have to do.  It might be easy to replace
> with fedora's even if they aren't interested in converging.

Fedora and RHEL have done the work, mostly.

[...]

> Going this direction will probably emphasize the already-existing need
> for an additional/optional variation of an EPEL-like repo that has
> newer replacement apps for RHEL/Centos.   These are separate but equal
> needs. That is, some situations will require/prefer the frozen
> versions and feature set of the enterprise distro, but many, perhaps
> most, would really like to have a current firefox and openoffice
> without replacing their kernel and device drivers on working systems.

Others are talking exactly the opposite: Keep all userland the same, but
make it work on new machines/take advantage of new hardware.

> The scheme that would make sense to me would be to make the update
> switch to 'stable mode' at end of life by default, retaining the app
> versions supported in the enterprise disto since this takes
> essentially no extra effort,

Nonsense. The versions in Fedora have by then drifted far from the
"enterprise distro". And keeping them up to date is /hard/ (that is what
people are paying for RHEL, essentially).

>                              and concentrate new volunteer effort on
> building current 'fedora-version' apps that could optionally be
> installed over the enterprise base.

And said new versions require new infrastructure (new libc, new Gnome, new
X, ...; yes, ABIs /do/ change without you being aware), and are built to
different environments (font/icon/... files are now elsewhere, new SELinux
layout, configuration conventions have changed, ...).

>                                      If the latter effort fails,
> you've still got a solid, working version.

If you want "solid, working", why are you messing around with
"bleeding-edge apps"?!
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
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