Fedora board meeting minutes [LWN.net]

Fedora board meeting minutes

Posted Nov 21, 2006 8:55 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Fedora board meeting minutes by jimmybgood
Parent article: Fedora board meeting minutes

Where have you got the idea about "12 months" support commitment ? The policy was always "FC N support is stopped 1-2 months before FC N+2 is released". And it was always honored AFAIK. It was good deal for developers (they only need to support two distributions, never three or more), but not so good for users (you can not skip FC releases - or you'll be without support at some point). If they'll offer some overlap between supported times of FC N and FC N+2 then user will be able to skip FC N+1 - big win!

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The Ministry of Truth

Posted Nov 21, 2006 21:12 UTC (Tue) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142) [Link]

You have redefined the outcome as the commitment, which is easy to do with the assistance of the good folks at "The Ministry of Truth". Here's a link to an article written on lwn.net which states, "Security updates are made for approximately one year...":

http://lwn.net/Articles/119892/

The original commitment was two releases a year with security updates available for FCN until FCN+2 was released. The month or two before part was added later and references to the original commitment were deleted. Notice how the original schedules have been removed and replaced with, well, a flat out lie.

Here is the original link to release schedules:

http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/

Which now makes the claim that "This Page Has Moved" and gives the new location:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule

But compare what you find at that link with what the Wayback Machine has archived:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040402104236/http://fedora.r...

And you'll see that not only was the page moved, it was also revised and condensed so as to make the comparison of schedules and actual release dates impossible. Without the Wayback Machine, of course.

The Ministry of Truth

Posted Nov 21, 2006 21:59 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The original commitment was two releases a year with security updates available for FCN until FCN+2 was released.

Care to elaborate? Where was it said? Yes, it was said that there are will be security updates "for approximately one year" and there are will be two releases per year - but I never seen any commitment to the FCN and FNC+2 overlap. A lot of people just assumed that "approximately one year" mean FCN and FNC+2 overlap (me included) but when FC3 was scheduled everyone found out that "approximately one year" mean "we'll stop support for FC1 before FC3 is released because we have limited resources and can not support both FC1/FC2 'in fligh' and do quality testing for FC3 release". There was some grumbling (because users hoped to switch from FC1 straight to FC3) - but I never seen any evidence that "approximately one year" ever was supposed to mean "slightly more then one year to allow FCN => FCN+2 transition" so it was left at that.

The Ministry of Truth

Posted Nov 21, 2006 23:41 UTC (Tue) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142) [Link]

It's fascinating what a little research will turn up. I'm dead wrong, at least as FC2 is concerned. You are also dead wrong and corbet was dead wrong in the article I cited. We were all just repeating rumours with our own spin.

I apologize to the fedora community.

I currently can find no indication that Fedora has any commitment to security or bug fix updates for any period. So I'll change my comment.

For me to believe that Fedora can be useful for any serious purpose other than demonstration or as a test bed for Redhat development, they need to clearly state how long they will provide support in the form of security updates.

The Ministry of Truth

Posted Nov 22, 2006 5:12 UTC (Wed) by mdomsch (subscriber, #5920) [Link]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ#head-9baa0612d025313054...

both indicate the previous updates and security policy. It lists the example that Fedora Core 3 was updated until Fedora Core 5 test2 was released. Under the new policy (using for example the same versions, just for comparison), Fedora Core 3 would be updated until Fedora Core 5 release plus one month. This is, in effect, an extension of maintenance by test2->release+1m.

Also discussed was "should the new policy be implemented retroactively" such that FC5 is covered until FC7+1m, or should it start with FC6. I believe there was concensus that it should include FC5 as well. This gives people a chance to do the upgrade from N to N+2 and be covered for the whole duration between, without forgoing security errata for a time, and without requiring an upgrade from N to N+1 to N+2 in order to get security errata during that time.