Rolling release Fedora - fantastic idea

[Kevin Kofler]

Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> To solve that, I'd be nice if there was a way to roll over an EOL
> version into an appropriate release of one of the long-term-supported
> systems such as RHEL, Centos or Scientific Linux.

This is impossible due to how the Fedora and RHEL releases align, and it is 
impossible to change that given RHEL's QA requirements.

When an RHEL release m based on Fedora n gets released, Fedora has long 
since moved on: Not only will Fedora n+1 be either already out or around the 
corner (and thus likely out by the time CentOS releases), but even Fedora n 
updates will now contain packages newer than RHEL m! (Heck, even Fedora n-1 
updates will!) RHEL does not include all the post-release version upgrades 
of the Fedora version it's based on. Some packages in RHEL m might even be 
newer than in Fedora n (backported from Fedora n+1 or even n+2), but others 
will be older, and never get upgraded in the lifetime of RHEL m. (RHEL's 
update policy is, by design, much more conservative than Fedora's, even the 
new one.)

So it is not possible to move from Fedora to RHEL (or equivalent) without 
downgrading some packages, and I don't see any way to change this. (It 
definitely can't be changed on the Fedora side. It could theoretically be 
changed on the RHEL side by backporting all the version upgrades from Fedora 
n into RHEL m, but I don't think that would fit the RHEL customers' 
requirements, so I don't see Red Hat allowing that, ever.)

        Kevin Kofler