FC2 release dates [hijacked thread]

[Paul Gear]

David Kewley wrote:
> ...
> Many folks are going to have to change their local release policies and 
> methodology.

It seems a lot of us are in this position, and none of the options are good.

> Our choices seem to be:
> 
> * roll out new releases *far* more often than we're used to, based on FC

Can't do that - not enough hours in the day already.

> * fork over some significant cash e.g. for RHEL licenses (which many can't 
> afford)

Definitely not affordable.  Based on the pricing i've seen (here in
.au), Solaris, Mac OS X, and NetWare are all cheaper, but none of them
thrill me as a good alternative to RHL.  For an academic institution, i
can get an *unlimited site license* for NetWare for less than the cost
of two RHEL ES licenses.  It's possible that even Micro$oft licensing
would work out cheaper in some scenarios.

> * try to make our own distro based on the RHEL srpm's (which feels like 
> cheating RH, but if it works, it could be a practical solution for us)

When they're releasing SRPMS, how can you say you're cheating them?  The
process is working as designed.

> * rely on community security updates (so far, too little concreteness to make 
> an organization's plans around this!)

A variant on this would be to roll your own security updates from the
upstream sources and the sources in FC1.

> * leave RH and Fedora

Unless the community effort to produce a modified RHEL distribution is
very successful, i see this as being the best of a bunch of bad
alternatives.  I'll be looking at Mandrake and possibly SuSE over the
Dec-Jan period.  If i switch, i'll be switching my home, work, and
another .edu where i volunteer over to the new distribution - i simply
can't afford the time committment to

> This is a *big* decision for a *lot* of folks.

Is there a way we could get together and try to make some co-ordinated
effort to help RH understand what they've done in alienating the
.edu/.org sector?

And of course, if that fails, making a co-ordinated effort to help each
other by providing a more stable FC or a free RHEL derivative would be a
reasonable alternative.

BTW, has there been any discussion on backporting RHEL features into FC?
 Does RH have a policy on this?  It seems to me that getting FC to a
state where security errata from RHEL could be applied to it would be a
reasonable compromise.
-- 
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net
-- 
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my email reply *below* the quoted text?
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