Accessing A Fedora 7 Box FROM The Net

[Paul]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of max
> Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 2009 11:46 AM
> To: Community assistance, encouragement,and advice for using Fedora.
> Subject: Re: Accessing A Fedora 7 Box FROM The Net
> 
> On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 12:46:57AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 05:20:26 +0200,
> >   Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> > > 
> > > PS: To all those who have replied in this thread: please 
> DO NOT ANSWER this
> > > sort of questions about unsupported releases (other than 
> with a reply like
> > > mine). You need to pressure people into upgrading, 
> refusing to answer any
> > > questions about the unsupported release is the best way. 
> Answering the
> > > question doesn't actually help the person who asked, 
> you're helping the
> > > script kiddies instead.
> > 
> > I disagree. He may have a legitimate reason for not 
> upgrading (such as current
> > kernels not working with his hardware). And it may be that 
> some software
> > on the machine is not stock F7, but in fact more recent 
> versions of critical
> > software. At this point we don't know. Certainly, strongly 
> suggesting an
> > upgrade is reasonable, but trying to use unrelated problems 
> as leverage
> > seems over the line to me.
> > 
>  If your going to use outdated software then there shouldn't 
> be any expectation of support. The expectation that you will 
> move away from unsupported releases is entirely reasonable. 
> Now your certainly free to do as you please but Kevin is 
> entirely correct. The continued use of unsupported software 
> is detrimental to the online community as a whole, if your 
> outdated F7 gets compromised your probably not going to be 
> the only one that suffers as a result. I see people 
> clobbering users with supported releases over the head 
> because they break the oh so precious netiquette but 
> apparently running unsupported software is ok, this in my 
> opinion is a much bigger breach of netiquette than top 
> posting will ever be. Responsible netizens? I 've seen that 
> term tossed around this list more than once, maybe people 
> should actually stop and think about what that means.
> -- 

Not everyone is such a whiz that they can just go and do an in-place upgrade
of any given Linux distribution. Windoze is bad enough with things breaking
on an upgrade, Fedora can be a nightmare, and that is on a stock distro
without manually updated or installed packages. This is why I personally
find the Fedora policy of tossing out a new distro every so often and
scrapping the one to or three places back so abhorrent. Have you seen the
uproar M$ has gone through over retiring XP? Responsible would be keeping
one version and keeping it patched as long as possible, not throwing out the
baby, bathwater and tub every six months. There is no actual need to do
this, it is just a choice made by the Fedora maintainers, to do it this way
rather than make the individual updates to each package, kernel included, as
they are brought out by the developers, and tested for use in the distro.

- Paul