extend EOL for Red Hat Linux 9?

[James Ralston]

On 2004-04-04 at 10:54:14-04 William Hooper <whooperhsd3 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Arguably the most popular release was 7.3, and it's support wasn't
> extended.

I would suspect Red Hat's reasoning was that people could still
upgrade to RHL9.

> If you start extending it, then you just have a vocal group saying
> "well, you extended it once..."

And the proper answer is, "We extended security errata support long
enough to allow a smooth transition to not only RHEL, but FC2 as well.
We do not plan to extend support again."

> Either a) go with Fedora Legacy or b) convince another third party
> to support it (like some are doing for 7.3).

Three words: embargoed security vulnerabilities.

Red Hat has knowledge of what security vulnerabilities have been
discovered but not yet made public.  As a result, Red Hat has time to
prepare relevant security errata and release them on the same day that
the vulnerabilities are made public.

To my knowledge, no current third-party support mechanism (e.g.,
Fedora Legacy) have access to embargoed security vulnerabilities.

(I've been building RPMs for years, so I don't personally need Fedora
Legacy (et. al.).  But I don't relish the mad patch/build/test
scramble that I would have to perform every time a new vulnerability
is discovered.)

Thus, Red Hat providing extended security errata support for RHL9 is
superior to any other solution.

James