Heads up on potential F8 update cutoff deadline issues.

[linux guy]

I understand that the cutoff date for updates to a Fedora release is
about 1 month after 2 newer releases have occurred.   Ie F10 is
scheduled to be released in November, 2008 thus putting the F8 cut off
at November + 1 month = December, 2008.

I think this policy needs some discussion with respect to F8 and the
result of that discussion needs to be *CLEARLY* communicated to the
community well in advance so that we can plan accordingly.

The elephant in the room with respect to this situation is KDE4.  I ran
F9 until this week and KDE4 is still lacking in many regards, especially
compared to the mature and stable KDE 3.5.10 in F8.  Nevertheless,
kernel and application development continues unabated and some of us are
going to need access to those updates while we continue to run F8,
awaiting a KDE4 that is... more polished. 

Maybe I am underestimating the version of KDE that will arrive in F10 ?

Notwithstanding that, I'm hoping  that the status of KDE4 is going to
justify keeping the F8 updates flowing longer than has been standard
practice.

Thanks

[Kevin Kofler]

Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123 <at> gmail.com> writes:
>  Maybe I am underestimating the version of KDE that will arrive in F10
> ? 
F10 will ship with a KDE 4.1.x (likely 4.1.2 or 4.1.3).

We will likely also make KDE 4.2 prerelease packages available through 
kde-redhat unstable before F8 goes EOL. If you really don't like 4.1, maybe 4.2 
is for you?

>  Notwithstanding that, I'm hoping  that the status of KDE4 is
> going to
>  justify keeping the F8 updates flowing longer than has been standard
>  practice. 
I don't think so. This does not depend on us KDE folks, and I don't think a 
special exception will be made for KDE 3.

Making critical security updates available through a third-party repository 
would be possible in principle, but 1. some infrastructure is needed (for 
example, there's no way I can host those updates on repo.calcforge.org, that 
would blow up the bandwidth limits very quickly) and 2. experience from the 
failed Fedora Legacy project shows that getting people to actually do the work 
is almost impossible. And while I would be willing to help for the 1-2 months 
between F8 EOL and the availability of KDE 4.2 for F10 if bridging those 1-2 
months was really the problem, I'm sure people will STILL ask for extended F8 
support no matter how many improvements KDE 4 is getting and I'm just plain not 
interested in providing updates for F8 forever (and I don't think any Fedora 
maintainer is). And I also doubt I or any other single person could really keep 
up with security fixes in a one-man show.

Face it, KDE 3 is essentially on life support, there's nothing interesting 
going on there anymore, Fedora is about showcasing new technologies, they just 
don't fit together. If you want to keep old software, you should be looking for 
another distribution.

        Kevin Kofler

[Kam Leo]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I understand that the cutoff date for updates to a Fedora release is
>  about 1 month after 2 newer releases have occurred.   Ie F10 is
>  scheduled to be released in November, 2008 thus putting the F8 cut off
>  at November + 1 month = December, 2008.
>
>  I think this policy needs some discussion with respect to F8 and the
>  result of that discussion needs to be *CLEARLY* communicated to the
>  community well in advance so that we can plan accordingly. 
The subject has been discussed since Fedora Core 1. No further
discussion is necessary. The life cycle policy,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle , use to be readily accessible
from the front page of the Fedora web site. It is now totally hidden
away. You need to know that you are searching for "life cycle" in
order to find it. One would expect to find a link under "Schedule" if
not "Releases". If it makes you feel any better file a RFE bug report
for a link on the front page.