Why should one upgrade Fedora whenever a new version is released?

James Hogarth james.hogarth at gmail.com
Mon Jul 15 06:10:38 UTC 2013


>
> Unless I missed it, nobody has described a particular use case yet in
> which it is obvious that it is good to use CentOS.  Upgrading holds its
> risks as well as using software that cannot be upgraded.  The future
> cannot be predicted.  So how do you make a decision like between using
> Fedora and CentOS?

As much as I disagree with Harald on certain issues he did give you the
answer to this... You just choose not to hear it.

In most business scenarios - the vast majority - it's insane to go with an
OS that only has a 6-12 month lifespan.

If buying hardware that probably will have a 3-5 year refresh cycle for a
start.

Time spent doing upgrades is time not doing something more interesting such
as testing new technology in a test lab.

The time taken to validate a complete stack for a business application
might well have you have way through the release cycle before it'd be
feasible to upgrade.

Massive overhauls of key components (the init system for example as a
recent issue) are a huge amount of risk.

As the number of systems goes up it becomes even trickier dealing with an
upgrade cycle... You really don't want 'fedup' to become your full time job
:-P

The key risk for upgrades in business is security fixes and not features -
these upgrades are present... Within the lifetime of a project you are
highly unlikely to be ripping out and replacing key bits of the application
stack.

Vendors (including pure open source solutions backed by a vendor) will
support a long term distribution but not something like fedora where the
increase of cost for them to support it due to potentially massive changes
every 6 months is significant.
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