reviving Fedora Legacy

[Bill Nottingham]

Patrice Dumas (pertusus at free.fr) 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proposed arrangement, your release would be just as old and outdated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