State of 7.2/8.0 in Fedora Legacy

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 10:26:36PM -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
[snip...]
> As we move forward, streamlining updates is absolutely necessary.  In 
> order to streamline, the bottlenecks need to be addressed, and today 
> these road blocks (aside from me and my personal time management 
> issues) are RHL 7.2 and RHL 8.0.
[snip]
> Please provide your (relevant) feedback.  Thanks.

IME it's possible to "upgrade" a machine from RHL 7.2 to recompiled RHEL
2.1 clones (such as CentOS-2) relatively easily. This is not the case
for RHL 7.3; many major RHL 7.3 components are newer than what shipped
with RHL 7.2 and RHEL 2.1 (e.g. KDE 3.0 vs. 2.2, glibc 2.2.5 vs. 2.2.4).

However, it's better to support a few releases well than many releases
poorly, and it seems like many more people are running 7.3 than 7.2,
so dropping 7.2 might be a good idea.

FWIW, I don't yet know whether I'll need support for RHL 8.0. I know
that at work, some people had various software compatibility problems
due to NPTL in RHL 9. I don't remember the exact details, except that
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL worked for some software, but not all (even booting
into an NPTL-incapable kernel didn't fix all problems); vendors had to
provide updates for the rest of the software. I *assume* there are now
updates available for everything that can't be fixed with
LD_ASSUME_KERNEL, but I won't know for a fact until I find and upgrade
all the 8.0 boxes...

However, I can't justify spending time on build or QA work for RHL
8.0 until I find a box that absolutely cannot be upgraded -- if such a
box even exists -- so if there aren't many other people who need 8.0 for
glibc-related reasons, then I have no problem with 8.0 being dropped.

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn at pobox.com>