On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 14:29 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 01:18:01PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
I understand that there is a market for a Fedora-based distribution which doesn't receive megabytes of updates each week, and which is supported for longer than a year.
What have been proposed so far doesn't solve the 'which doesn't receive megabytes of updates each week' part, only the 'supported for longer than a year' part.
What I _don't_ understand is why these requirements are not met by CentOS. Isn't that _precisely_ the 'market' that RHEL and CentOS exist to serve?
Because it is not the same as you stress yourself. Centos is clearly not the same than 'Fedora-based distribution which is supported for longer than a year'. It allows to use innovative technologies while not being forced to update each year.
This is the part I have difficulty understanding. You want to use new and innovative technologies, but you don't want to update your nice stable system?
Do you want a perpetual motion machine with that too?
You're right -- you are offered updates, or you are offered stability, and there isn't much of a middle ground. But that's just reality.
As I see it, there is a continuum of sorts -- from the daily churn of rawhide, through the less anarchic but still considerable churn of the latest Fedora release (currently F9), to the more conservative set of updates for the previous release (F8), and then a bit of a jump to the long-term stagnation¹ of RHEL/CentOS. You can pick whichever one you like, according to your needs.
The last jump is not realistic in all cases. What should F6 user jump to? Centos 5? Centos 6? And F8 users?
F6 is basically RHEL4/CentOS 4 for the most part, isn't it? And F8 would probably be closest to RHEL5/CentOS 5.
The proposal is not to create a new distribution, but simply have EOLed branches acl removed and leave the possibility to build and push the results, with a limitation of the changes to grave bug fixes and security issues.
So no new innovation then? And you'd want to do this for _every_ six-monthly release of Fedora? Surely that's a whole boatload of effort you don't need? Why not just do it for every other release? Or, perhaps more usefully, every third release -- a new one about every 18 months?
I see no fundamental reason why we should _forbid_ people from doing security updates for packages in EOL distributions, although I'm very wary of the expectations that it would create. If we ship official-looking updates for _some_ security bugs, naïve users will quite reasonably expect that they'll be receiving updates for _all_ serious security bugs, and our "You are unsupported; you need to upgrade before you get hacked" message will be compromised.
I also think that with a niche market that small, between Fedora and CentOS, you are unlikely to get enough volunteers to keep it viable -- isn't that what happened with Fedora Legacy last time?
(That being said, it is also possible that 'which doesn't receive megabytes of updates each week' issue may deserve to be looked at, but it is a different issue).
That and/or ensuring that the packages you miss in CentOS are actually in EPEL.