long term support release

[Les Mikesell]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> 
>> How about a slight variation on the fedora LTS plan that might vastly 
>> reduce the needed work and let people keep running without the
>> dangers of going without security fixes?  What if the versions
>> supported were the ones used as the base of the RHEL cuts, and the
>> subsequent updates were recompiled from the CentOS source RPM's?
>> There's a certain amount of incest or irony there, depending on how
>> you look at it, but isn't re-using work what free software is
>> supposed to be all about?
>>
>> In some cases you might need to re-enable some features removed in
>> RHEL (as CentosPlus does with the kernel) but the changes should all
>> be pretty obvious to someone with both source packages.  And it would
>> be nice if additional feature-enabled packages made it into the
>> Centosplus repo in the cases where a fedora packager wanted to
>> maintain them.
>>
>> I could see why RH might oppose this for business reasons - but if 
>> that's the case they should just say so.
> 
> What's the point?  Just the warm/fuzzy of being able to say "It's
> Fedora!" ?

Yes, it would be a big win for the fedora 'brand' perception to make it 
actually usable instead of just a rolling alpha/beta for RHEL.  If you 
are going to argue that such a perception shouldn't exist, just say so 
instead of claiming that it's too hard or that failed earlier attempts 
prove it can't be done.

 > With EPEL you can get just about all the functionality you
> need, with a few minor exceptions.  I'm not sure I get the point of
> rebuilding things again and pushing them out through a different update
> system.

That's *if* you uninstall fedora and re-install RHEL or CentOS, and then 
locate and install all of the matching packages you had, which may or 
may not be possible and it's certainly not easy.  Shouldn't you reward 
the people who survived the wild and crazy changes that fedora makes in 
the first 2 revs after the RHEL cuts with a version that continues to 
run for a while without security worries?  I think this would attract a 
lot more fedora users and be a good thing all the way around.  Now for a 
*really* warm/fuzzy about the free software community, you could just 
converge this version's update repo with the corresponding 
EPEL/centos/centosplus repo contents and make them end up the same 
without a re-install or any duplication of infrastructure at all.  I 
haven't done a whole lot of cross-rebuilding, but off the top of my head 
I can't think of anything that wouldn't work unchanged between 
FC6/Centos5 and if there are any they are probably artifacts of post-cut 
fedora-side updates to FC6 that wouldn't have necessarily been done with 
a converged plan.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com