Fedora release lifecyle

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 12/13/06, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Rahul Sundaram (sundaram at fedoraproject.org) said:
> >> If we are not planning on having Fedora as a stable server, we should
> >> not release a server variant. If we are going to do desktop and server
> >> variants, we should put some incrementally more effort into actually
> >> have something useful in each of these variants rather than just a
> >> different bunch of packages and stop going back and forth on what we are
> >> trying to do.
> >
> > So, the only differentiation that's possible for a Server is the lifecycle?
> > I don't buy that.
>
> There are various other ways to differentiate a server variant but
> extending the life cycle is in many cases much needed. It expands the
> scope of the variant being more useful than just a precursor of RHEL. I
> think we should atleast seriously consider serving that need. Giving
> that we already do backports, the merge of core and extras and the
> critical security fixes only policy for the last six months I suggested
> it does appear doable.
>

The question that needs to be answered is who is the customer and what
are they going to pay for this? Payment does not need to be cash, but
it would help. The reason is that someone is going to have to pay for
the engineering, qa, documentation, bandwidth, etc.

The past has shown that Legacy gets volunteers who are interested in
certain packages and/or releases. Once that release is up, they are no
longer interested as they have usually transitioned their stuff to
Centos, Ubuntu, etc.

There are people who want longer release times, but I have not seen
that want translated into either cash or volunteer time. My opinion is
that while I would like to see 18 months of support, I am already
getting 4 free boons from Red Hat: 1) regularly compiled and tested
bits called Fedora X (versus just rawhide), 2) 11-13 months of
security updates and some enhancement updates, 3) source code for
their RHEL which people can get compiled bits from
Centos/Whitebox/EatAtJoesLinux, and 4) source code for security
updates for RHEL for 7 years (where you can get the compiled bits from
EatAtJoes Enterprise Linux).

For anything more than that.. I need to supply something to the bargain.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"