Release cycle

[Maynard Kuona]

I have been doing some thinking about Redhat's (And mandrake and SuSE)
release cycles. It was especially with reference to projects such as
Fedora, which aim to provide high quality third party packages for
Redhat. Are these not being stifled by the release cycles. If these
projects are going to make a commitment to quality, the short release
cycles shall surely hurt them. After a while, you can imagine that they
will begin to ignore older releases, and leaving some people with the
option to either upgrade (Not usually a great option) or remain outdated
and without a source of decent third party packages.

Is Redhat working with these efforts in any direct way through maybe
hardware purchases, paying people to actually package some of the
software etc. I imagine this could be a chance for Redhat to actually
shed some of its responsibility to provide these packages, and have this
volunteer effort actually become the "official: third party source for
packages and updates.

But most importantly, how does the release schedule affect a project
like Fedora. Maybe I just need to understand. Also it may be nice to
include the Fedora repository and pre-configured apt/yum packages so
that users could be good to go after installing. This though would
entail giving Fedora packages for their repository as soon as the iso's
are released.