Rolling release Fedora - fantastic idea

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 01/30/2012 07:55 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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.
...
> 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.

The downgrades would actually be better than having an unsupported 
system that doesn't get any updates ever. The assumption here is that 
the downgrades aren't introducing any security or fundamental 
functionality issues--hopefully, 'long term support' means that they 
would fix such problems.

In other words, consider an EOL Fedora system that for some reason can't 
be upgraded/rebuilt to the latest release. In order to maintain such 
system one has to follow every installed package and keep cherry-picking 
relevant critical updates, in order to manually build and install custom 
packages.

The alternative you describe would mean some temporary pain resulting 
from this 'slight downgrade rollover' that is hopefully much less than a 
complete reinstall After that, the system would be on automatic updates, 
so it wouldn't require constant supervision.

Naturally, one could still cherry-pick a specific later version and 
build/install its package, if there were some specific issues with 
specific packages---much less of a burden.

I will look around and see if I had a candidate to try this method on. I 
think the yum-only upgrade method should work for this!

Thanks for the idea

przemek