Updates Politics Proposal

Michael Schout mschout at gkg.net
Fri May 27 19:53:37 UTC 2005


G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> That would be nice except for one thing, these distributions check the
> bios for newness and when it is not sufficiently new installation of
> these becomes a big problem. On the other hand, RH7.3 is stable but does
> need to support more modern apps. 

I have upgraded a number of RH7.3 machines straight to CentOS-3 using
"yum" without a reinstall. There were a few conflicts that had to be
deinstalled before the upgrade, but it was not a big deal. 7.3 binaries
seem to be compatible (some of our custom in-house applications were
installed on 7.3 and they still run under CentOS-3 without a recompile.
 So it is not difficult to migrate to a supported operation system in my
opinion.  The biggest hurdle is if you are running a web server, you are
going from apache 1.3 to apache 2.0.  You can just exclude those from
the upgrade though using yum.conf.

Due the the fact that we used "yum" to upgrade, no bios check was
involved.  Some of the machines I've upgraded this way are over 7 years old.

My feeling and understanding is that RH7.3 support should continue to be
for "security fixes" only.  Legacy 7.3 support is meant to plug the
security holes until you can migrate to an officially supported
distribution.  There simply is not enough manpower to do any more than that.

One thing that *could* help for legacy, is if we allowed security fixes
to be released for a specific release as they are ready.  E.g.: if we
have enough PUBLISH and VERIFY votes for 7.3, we could release the 7.3
update.  This would help avoid the current situation where packages have
been QA'd for 7.3, but are held up waiting on FC1, FC2, or RH9 for
example.  I'd really like to see that happen personally, but it is not
up to me :).

Regards,
Michael Schout




More information about the fedora-legacy-list mailing list