Long-term support and backport risk

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 20, 2007 18:36 UTC (Wed) by pcampe (subscriber, #28223)
Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk

Now there's a major release of RHEL every 18 months (from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5 there have been about 20 months, due to the difficult Xen integration into the kernel), and every 4 months there's a minor upgrade (5.0 -> 5.1 -> 5.2), and the support is for several years (7 IIRC).

I guess it's possible to change the balance between (time between major releases) and (time between minor releases) if we change accordingly the balance between (new features in majors) and (new "features" in minors). Maybe a major release should be shipped once a year, and the <7 years of minor release support could cover only bug and security fixes.

Pros for the customer: stable ABI for third party drivers and applications once a version has been chosen; more time for choosing when(if) doing a major upgrade, knowing that a fallback exists. The vendor will have more versions to support, but each one will definitely requires a lot less effort.

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