Fedora release lifecyle

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sun Dec 17 11:07:54 UTC 2006


Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

> 
> The question that needs to be answered is who is the customer and what
> are they going to pay for this? Payment does not need to be cash, but
> it would help. The reason is that someone is going to have to pay for
> the engineering, qa, documentation, bandwidth, etc.
> 
> The past has shown that Legacy gets volunteers who are interested in
> certain packages and/or releases. Once that release is up, they are no
> longer interested as they have usually transitioned their stuff to
> Centos, Ubuntu, etc.
> 
> There are people who want longer release times, but I have not seen
> that want translated into either cash or volunteer time. My opinion is
> that while I would like to see 18 months of support, I am already
> getting 4 free boons from Red Hat: 1) regularly compiled and tested
> bits called Fedora X (versus just rawhide), 2) 11-13 months of
> security updates and some enhancement updates, 3) source code for
> their RHEL which people can get compiled bits from
> Centos/Whitebox/EatAtJoesLinux, and 4) source code for security
> updates for RHEL for 7 years (where you can get the compiled bits from
> EatAtJoes Enterprise Linux).
> 
> For anything more than that.. I need to supply something to the bargain.

3) and 4) while beneficial is irrelevant if you would consider Fedora as 
a independent distribution. I am not bargaining. I consider 18 months as 
a good balance and I am putting up a RFE on that. That's generally 
considered a contribution by itself.

If you would consider the current effort as a merge between core,extras 
and legacy, we need to look at letting open the possibility of a longer 
lifecycle since the lower barrier to entry aided by the focus on a 
single infrastructure might help us get more volunteers involved now.

Rahul




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