reviving Fedora Legacy

[David Woodhouse]

On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 22:14 -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 06:22:16PM -0700, Bob Arendt wrote:
> > I really don't see how a Fedora Legacy can be maintained.  If the 
> > goal is increased stability and security patches, you need to 
> > guarantee that you have folks supporting backpatches to the kernel, 
> > glibc, firefox, evolution, openoffice, and several other large and 
> > complex packages.  Incorporating new security patches into old 
> > baselines is *hard*. Plus Fedora would "fork" a new release every 6 
> > months.  How many legacy Fedora's would be retained?  At some point 
> > it seems the legacy volunteer force would saturate and legacy 
> > Fedora's would have to start dropping off every 6 months.
> 
> Why do we need to guarantee any more than active Fedora releases 
> guarantee?  Forget backporting.  Just upgrade the package.  Take it 
> from the current Fedora and rebuild it if necessary.

Once you start upgrading packages all over the place to a much newer
version than was in the original release, you might as well just
upgrade.

Seriously, I don't know why people are so scared of just _upgrading_, if
new packages are acceptable.

I upgrade remote, headless machines with yum, and reboot them into the
new distribution. Quite frequently. And I laugh at the people who say it
doesn't work. It's a fairly fundamental part of my server management
technique -- yes, I run Fedora on my servers.

Perhaps a better approach to this whole thing would be to educate people
a little better that upgrades _do_ work, and they're generally fairly
seamless. And to fix the occasional cases where they're not.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation