an update to automake-1.11?

[Nalin Dahyabhai]

On Wed, Jul 01, 2009 at 11:52:20AM +0200, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> IOW, what's Fedora good for after its EOL?  If it is a museum
> artifact, then I'm spoiling the game.  If it is to be used in real
> life, then update to Automake 1.11 is beneficial for the developers
> using it and harmless for the non-developer uses (office, proxy,
> etc.)

After a release goes EOL, we don't push updates for it.  That means we
don't push security updates for it.  To me, that means people shouldn't
use it.

That's my short answer anyway.

Here's the long one:

The above having been said, you obviously *can*, but outside of making
sure things build on it -- a development use case which upgrading the
developer tools and libraries actually makes less useful for me -- I
strongly recommend against doing so.

Of course, I can't deny that there are people who continue to run EOL
releases in production.  But in doing so they take on the responsibility
of ensuring that things which might need updates (in particular,
security updates) either get them, or are only deployed in such a way
that they're not affected by whatever issues would normally require
updates.

That cumulative list of issues typically grows for a given release as
time passes (and as each successive release reaches EOL with an
ever-larger set of packages it may grow at a faster rate), so the amount
of work also grows as time passes.

I worry that some of the people who run EOL releases don't even know
that they've taken on this burden, that a release going EOL means that
we're not doing this work any more, and that means that *they* have to
do the work.  And I worry that that's partly due to us not always being
emphatic about warning them of it.  Sometimes it feels like failure.

Cheers,

Nalin