Hosting End-Of-Life Fedora Base images?

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jul 21, 2015 at 11:05:19AM -0500, Adam Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> > Isn't it true the install media ISOs are available indefinitely? And
> > if so the security cat is already out of the bag, so that's not a very
> > good argument. I'd say if we wanted to do something better it would be
> > an image that's usable for both VM and containers, and would be the
> > state of that version at the time it went EOL, i.e. it has all
> > available updates baked into it. And then de-emphasize the original
> > ISO as the way to run older versions of Fedora.
> 
> It is true that install media ISOs are available forever, but we don't
> go backwards in time and create vagrant boxes or IaaS cloud qcow
> images of old EOL'd Fedora releases that went EOL before those
> technologies existed and/or became popular. I don't see why we would
> start doing so now for docker images.

The security downsides of officially distributed docker images for EOL
versions are already mentioned, and i think that alone should be enough
to kill the idea. Beyond that though, making these EOL images available
is going to consume a non-zero amount of maintainer time for at least
one person, thus inevitably diverting resources away from making current
non-EOL Fedora better.

Avoiding maintainer time being sucked up on old releases is why we EOL
them in the first place, and the rationale for existence of long term
support alternatives like RHEL & CentOS. So I don't think we should
consider cloud images any differently in that respect. Fedora is about
being at the cutting edge and that's where we should focus our limited
resources, even for cloud images.

If people want cloud images with older software versions than are in the
current supported Fedora, they should be looking for cloud images from
CentOS/RHEL instead.

Regards,
Daniel
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