R P Herrold wrote:
Joshua Penix wrote:
Yes, Fedora Core 2 is in "legacy" status, but that simply means that
the Fedora project itself is not producing updates. That's what the
Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) is for, and they are
now fully maintaining security updates for FC2 as well as FC1, RedHat
9 and RedHat 7.3.
well, not exactly 'fully' -- It is lightly QA'ed, releases late, and
after much gnashing of teeth. RH's approach on Fedora clearly has been
and is still advertised as a non-long-term, non-enterprise ready approach
Which is just exactly what many of us prefer. Besides, I'll take
"release late" (I'm not exactly sure of your context here) to "release
never" any day if I'm trying to maintain an older distro version. The
point of fedoralegacy.org is to continue support for older RH distributions.
The efforts to keep these FC ephemeral distributions on life support
(rather than using a long-lived distribution from the start), seems to
me to be a wasteful dilution of developer resources.
Redhat (and its Fedora counterparts) are at the mercy of developers of
those apps contained within their respective distributions the same as
the rest of us. Sure, Redhat employs some people to tweak things a bit
here and there. However, keep in mind that Redhat is a packager, not an
application developer. I doubt developers are asking Redhat (or any
other distro maintainer) when they're ready to receive the next
iteration of app XYZ. No doubt the distro packagers have just as hard a
time catching up as the rest of us.
Note that the latest Knoppix (3.9?) will be the last single-CD version.
Note that FC4 has dropped a lot of apps (as did FC3) in order to keep
the CD set down to four discs.
They're doing a great service for the RedHat/Fedora-using Linux
community and should not be overlooked. Their work has kept a good
number of my well-working RH9 boxes from being forced onto the
upgrade treadmill.
but RHL9 != the FC series. The Red Hat 'A team' stabilization talent
might pick and poke at FC (via RawHide), but their Enterprise product
rules the roost a the end of the day.
- Russ Herrold
Sure, if you /need/ an enterprise product. Some of us don't. Fedora fits
the bill there.
Given the very nature of FOSS development (and it's primary distribution
vehicle, Linux) the days of fine-tune for a couple of years till things
are just right are passing away quickly. Release early, release often is
the mantra of FOSS development.
Stable too often now means "old, out of date, and buggy". In some
environments, that's preferred. In most it's not. I want support for the
latest stuff I have, I want it free of major bugs, and I want it *now*.
The FOSS software development process seems to move so fast now, that it
really can never (on purpose) produce anything stable. The attention
span of both users and developers is just too short for that to ever
happen. And all of our appetites are too large.
I think the Fedora process understands this. At least it works for me.
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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