long term support release

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Jan 26 19:43:24 UTC 2008


Joachim Frieben wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2008 5:13 PM, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> 
>> Do you want current packages or do you want the 3 year versions in RHEL?
>>
>> Ralf
> 
> 
> Why would you have to use 3 year old package versions when the RHEL release
> cycle is 18 months? Honestly speaking, for people interested in actually
> using an OS to get some real -work- done instead of seeking a life on the
> bleeding edge for their own thrill, RHEL5 and respins of it are very well
> usable. 

Things are never that simple. It's easy to say you should use an 
enterprise version if you want to run some service for years - and 
hindsight is easy when someone gets that wrong.  However when you are 
setting up something new you don't know if you'll want the same thing 
next week let alone years from now.  So you start with fedora to have 
the latest tools, build something than happens to work nicely, then the 
security updates end.  Or, the other way around, you start with a stale 
distro for stability but soon need a feature that is missing. There are 
thousands of programs involved in a distribution and you have to change 
them all and deal with an assortment of incompatible differences to get 
the one little thing you needed.

> The Fedora user community is much more biased towards software
> enthousiasts and early adopters, and in general, they wouldn't even stick to
> Fedora release N after release N+1 has been readied 6 months later.
> Accordingly, I would expect the interest of LTS for this group to be rather
> limited.

If you think Fedora users should be limited to people that have some 
particular interest in fedora rather than anyone being able to use it as
a generally usable OS, that view makes sense, but I'd rather have the 
latter.  As a case in point, consider the situation of k12ltsp users. 
K12ltsp is a fedora respin that includes the ltsp package configured to 
boot thin clients 'out of the box' and some additional packages and it 
is widely used in school classrooms and labs.  The last fedora-based 
build is from FC6 and the people running them have just noticed that 
they aren't getting security updates anymore - probably a very bad thing 
in a hostile environment like a classroom.  There is an alternative 
built on Centos5, but these are people with better things to do than 
rebuild their classroom infrastructure with the associated risks 
mid-year.  While they probably should have known what to expect, I think 
the fedora-based version was released before the centos one, so for a 
certain time window (and probably the one that matters for schools) the 
decision on what to install would have involved the feature differences 
between FC6 and CentOS4 which are fairly large.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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