On 12/09/2016 11:17 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:

For other software, where users would like the
version to match more closely the long lifecycle, maybe there could be
a hand-off from Fedora version to CentOS version.

Yeah, hand-offs would be a great feature for the users. Right now, it's tricky to use Fedora in production because of the 18-month support cycle; a smooth hand-off would make it much easier to manage Fedora installations, and therefore would help adoption. I know I would use Fedora more in production if I could rely on hand-off.

It would be a great selling point:
Fedora offers cutting-edge features now, and transitions gently to long term support.

Strangely, this also affects RedHat commercial products: we've run into situations where we deployed paid, supported systems and then something happened and they fell off the list, thus losing updates. I thought it'd be a nice feature in RedHat to hand off unsupported systems to CentOS. Right now, I buy commercial support for the most important systems, deploy CentOS for not very important ones that don't need latest versions, and use Fedora when I need the most recent features. Hand-offs that work across all three(*) would make managing this stuff much easier.

I had a conversation with RedHat, arguing that whatever revenue they lost on those systems would be offset by having more systems overall, because people like me would be less hesitant to deploy RedHat; long-term support considerations would be decoupled from technical issues.

(*) of course only in reasonable configurations: I could only see two useful hand-offs: Fedora ->CentOS and RedHat -> CentOS---I can't see how it'd make sense to hand-off from e.g. RedHat to Fedora.