What we're forgetting . . .

[Philip Molter]

> I too lack time to contribute other than my projects' funding of
> the SNARE ports to FC2 & FC3.  Since that has locked us into
> very specific kernel releases (2.6.9 & 2.6.11), we're currently
> exploring what path to take to allow us to upgrade to something
> newer (and I like what I've been reading about FC5 ... looks
> like we'll be skipping FC4 completely :-).  However for now,
> we *are* very locked in to FC2 & FC3, and won't be putting in
> the effort to upgrade our FC2 systems until we have somewhere
> past FC3 to go.  So I too expect that we'll be using FC2 for
> several months to come.

We run a bunch of FC2 servers.  We're trying to migrate them to FC4. 
While FC2 is very stable for us, FC4 is less so.  It's not as if the 
security and bugfix patches in FC2 have ever really been what I would 
call "speedy" anyway, so I don't think dropping it is going to cause a 
lot of pain either way.

The reason FC2 is such a sticky release is that it was the first 2.6 
Fedora release.  It's been around long enough to get stable, and it's 
not very old.  It's a 2.6.10 kernel.  That's not very far removed from 
the 2.6.16 kernels of today.  I'm personally not going to complain if 
it's dropped, as the schedule for such things has been posted for a long 
time, but if you wonder why people stick around on old releases, even as 
they approach their EoL, well, stability plays a key part.

With that said, it'd be nice if right after a release was moved into 
FC4, the outstanding bugs (not security fixes, but bugs) were addressed. 
  FC2's kernel, for example, has numerous little bugs that were in 
Bugzilla both before and after the Legacy switch that are easy to fix 
and have been addressed with both posted patches and later updates that 
were just never addressed in Legacy.  The *perfect* time to do this is 
right after the switch.  Think of it as a stability focus period, and 
then once all the little things that tend to get ignored by Fedora 
proper get ironed out (I would think a lot of those things are extremely 
simple to handle), then the distro is really solid for a lifetime of 
security updates.

I'm a user, not a QA guy, though.  I'm not sure if my opinion is valid.

Philip