lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>:

> I know that personally I haven't been able to contribute the amount of time
> I'd like to make this succeed. But I have a full-time job and a young child,
> and am mildly active in umpteen other projects. Legacy support is hard work,
> and really needs two or three full-time workers to be a success. It's
> tempting to blame the lack of volunteers, but this sort of project works
> best if there's a solid base.

I can't disagree with that.

> I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora
> ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros
> like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the
> end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora.

I think it is good for everyone.  RHEL and its clones have a different
mission than Fedora, and people should use the one that fits their needs.
The two fill different needs.

> Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically
> useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be
> _part_ of its mission.

It is exactly what it is supposed to be.  Yes, that is only part of the
mission, the other major part being a test-bed for RHEL.  The mission
also includes helping developers, providing consistency of interfaces,
and making the Fedora "experience" better for the end user.  But the whole
point of Fedora is to be leading/cutting edge, and you can't be leading
edge with a long lifetime.

Fedora Legacy is really only there to allow for a more flexible upgrade
schedule for the users, not to extend the lifetime any real length of time.
That is, maybe a particular site can only upgrade 2 times per year, and
those times don't match with the Fedora Project release schedule.  Fedora
Legacy allows them to keep running the previous version in a _secure_
manor until their update window comes along.  That's really all Fedora
Legacy is for, as concerns Fedora Core (not Red Hat Linux, which is a
slightly different issue).

Now, maybe we've dropped the ball (on delivering the "secure" part of
the promise).  I won't argue that.  Nor can I say exactly why the
ball might have been dropped, or how best to pick it back up.

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!