On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 22:14 -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 06:22:16PM -0700, Bob Arendt wrote:
> I really don't see how a Fedora Legacy can be maintained. If the
> goal is increased stability and security patches, you need to
> guarantee that you have folks supporting backpatches to the kernel,
> glibc, firefox, evolution, openoffice, and several other large and
> complex packages. Incorporating new security patches into old
> baselines is *hard*. Plus Fedora would "fork" a new release every 6
> months. How many legacy Fedora's would be retained? At some point
> it seems the legacy volunteer force would saturate and legacy
> Fedora's would have to start dropping off every 6 months.
Why do we need to guarantee any more than active Fedora releases
guarantee? Forget backporting. Just upgrade the package. Take it
from the current Fedora and rebuild it if necessary.
Once you start upgrading packages all over the place to a much newer
version than was in the original release, you might as well just
upgrade.
Seriously, I don't know why people are so scared of just _upgrading_, if
new packages are acceptable.
I upgrade remote, headless machines with yum, and reboot them into the
new distribution. Quite frequently. And I laugh at the people who say it
doesn't work. It's a fairly fundamental part of my server management
technique -- yes, I run Fedora on my servers.
Perhaps a better approach to this whole thing would be to educate people
a little better that upgrades _do_ work, and they're generally fairly
seamless. And to fix the occasional cases where they're not.
--
David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse(a)intel.com Intel Corporation