Fedora release lifecyle

[Jesse Keating]

On Sunday 17 December 2006 06:07, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> 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.

I wouldn't count on that.  When newer versions are available, the mass 
majority of your userbase is going to flock to those newer versions, leaving 
the older versions behind.  By and large the people would care about versions 
more than 13 months old are going to be the same people who have no time to 
contribute anything toward them.

You'd be asking maintainers to care about four (five or six if you count EPEL) 
different branches of their software, many of these maintainers are 
volunteers.  That's a huge commitment to make, especially if they're not 
getting paid for it.

I think the experiment of longer lifespan has been tried, and it failed.  13 
months is a great place to make our new line, and anything more is better 
suited by other products.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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