Fedora and the System Administrator

Stephen Smoogen smoogen at lanl.gov
Tue Sep 30 23:41:55 UTC 2003


On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 17:31, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> > Fedora lifetime is from 6 to 9 *months* http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
> > 
> > I would like to see an extension of 6 months more, more or less. At least
> > for _base_(kernel....) components.
> 
> Whoa!  Am I reading this correctly?  Approximately nine months after a 
> version is released, apt/yum/up2date will stop working for a release?  
> Holy shit, my boss is gonna can this distro completely!
> 
> At least with RHL we had *some* stability....*sigh*
> 

1) Read the FAQ and website.
2) If you NEED long term stability then you are going to have to pay for
it. You can either pay Red Hat for RHEL, pay an outside contractor to
maintain packages for 2 year length of time, or pay people inside your
company to maintain those packages.
3) If you dont really NEED long term stability you can hope that there
will be enough interest in Fedora Legacy so that older releases will be
maintained by people. However those will be volunteers and may drop a
package at any time.

I dont expect that this will be any different for any of the Linux
companies and volunteer orgs (Debian) in the coming years. Everytime
there is a new Debian, the security volunteers say they will only
maintain the old release for 6 months and there is great wailing and
nashing of teeth about how shitty Debian is. 

In the end, there is no such thing as a free lunch/coke/os. The first
one might seem free, but eventually its gonna cost ya.



-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Lab  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --





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