RFE: Retire Fedora Core 4 only _after_ FC6 has been released.

[Peter Arremann]

On Wednesday 18 January 2006 08:21, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Note that Fedora Core 3 release updates maintained by Red Hat has
> already been extended for a few months.  Red Hat has been maintaining
> updates on Fedora Core 3 for an year and two months as opposed to
> elevent months of updates for Fedora Core 2 due to prolonged development
> release cycle of Fedora Core 5. So its not a question of extending the 
> release cycle for Red Hat but managing two releases in additional to
> working on  the development code for the next subsequent major release
> along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux development and maintenance. We
> could even shorten the development time on the subsequent release and
> thereby reducing the time spend by Red Hat spends on older release. This
> is in effect does what you request but results in a even shorter amount
> of updates provided by Red Hat for any given release of Fedora Core. In
> my opinion that is not desirable.
Please don't take this as a flame - but why should users care about that part? 
You have a very valid point considering amount of work that RH engineers need 
to do, but to the outside workd, it sounds a lot like the "dog ate my 
homework" kinda excuse... Why should a Fedora user care about how much time 
RH spends on RHEL? After all, they are not using RHEL but Fedora - which RH 
so often states is a community project... 

What I can't judge is the amount of work that this creates. FC3 has received 
11 new srpms since beginning of the year. If you extend the "official" 
support for FC3 by 2 or 3 more months until shortly after FC5 is out, how 
much more work would that really be? 


> What are users really concerned about?. Are they concerned about
> receiving continuous updates from the Fedora Project or the quality of
> the Fedora Legacy updates?. 

I don't think that's the question. The question is more like "Do I want to be 
considered a legacy?"... Absolutely non-technical, but honestly - the word 
legacy has such a negative meaning in english for many people. In the 
perception of most users legacy systems only receive the most essential 
security updates and if you ask for support the techs will laugh and make 
comments "anyone still using that?" 

I agree with the original poswer that - no matter if technically there is a 
good reason or not - people should be given a good choice of when to upgrade 
and to what release. Most people simply don't see staying with a legacy 
system as a choice. 

Peter.