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Fedora and long term supportFedora and long term supportPosted Oct 17, 2008 20:57 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767)Parent article: Fedora and long term support
A have been both a fan and a critic of Fedora. (As some of you around here have likely noticed.) Fedora is a great distro as long as people let it be what it is. The problem that I see is not so much with the distro itself, but with its "fanboys". I should probably qualify my use of that term. I use it very literally. Fedora, like any distro, has fans... and it has fanboys. The fans are positive but honest about what Fedora is, and what it is appropriate for. The fanboys want to present Fedora as something which is all things to all people. They want to call one a troll for saying that it is not really a production distro. I know this very well because I have been called exactly that for saying exactly that in various forums. As a technology showcase, Fedora is great. As a production distro... well... it depends *very* much on exactly what you are doing, what you need, what you expect, and what resources you have to pick up when Fedora's goals diverge from your own. (Fedora devs are quick to say "that's not our problem" when goals diverge.)
In a nutshell, I think that I can trace most of my satisfaction with Fedora to the stated goals of the project, and most of my dissatisfaction to allowing myself, at times, to start to believe some of the claims that well-meaning fanboys make about it. To the point that I deploy it where I should have used CentOS or Ubuntu. I F8'd when I should have CentOS 5'd at a client site early this year, and it was pretty embarrassing. Things did eventually work out. But I'm waiting for a window to open to side-grade to CentOS 6. I'll have to do at least one more Fedora upgrade before that happens, though. And I'm not sure whether it should be to F9 or F10. If I do F10, they're good for another year. If I do F9, they get something that has been tested for a while, but have to upgrade again in 6 months. And it is unclear when RHEL6/CentOS6 can be expected.
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Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 17, 2008 21:22 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
"Things did eventually work out. But I'm waiting for a window to open to side-grade to CentOS 6"
This I believe sums up the underlying community experience that is open for improvement in the Fedora ecosystem. Instead of trying to re-invent Fedora so it meets the needs of long timescale deployments, is a transitional process from Fedora to CentOS or RHEL achievable for users who need it? Can work be done to make it easier for a Fedora installation to be transitioned into a CentOS or RHEL deployment when the local admin decides the rapid rate of change in Fedora is no longer suitable for the deployment situation?
Would the admins who would potentially benefit from this sort of transitional effort inside the Fedora ecosystem of distributions contribute their own time into finding a way to ease such a transition?
-jef
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 19, 2008 3:45 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I believe the only reasonable way of doing this is rescuing the modified configuration, install from scratch and retrofit the saved configurations. This is what we did by hand when the Fedora churn became too much (and furthermore lost synchrony with the terms here).
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 2:17 UTC (Sat) by Nord (guest, #35114) [Link]
> As a production distro... well... it depends *very* much on exactly what you are doing, what you need, what you expect, and what resources you have to pick up when Fedora's goals diverge from your own. (Fedora devs are quick to say "that's not our problem" when goals diverge.)
Any comments I've seen were about "community does not wait for any single". But look at the typical sitution: I'm an ordinary desktop user, it is not too difficult to me to install new Fedora to see it, to test it and write several bugreports to Bugzilla. But with the current Fedora policy this situation becomes less widespread, because Fedora guys don't worry about compatibility. They may easily break anything, which are currently working, of course saying "that's not our problem". Switching to new Fedora release is more and more similar to playing "Russian roulette": a few persons would like to play, a fewer stay alive (in a sense of being Fedora users). Less people means less testing, more bugs stay unrecognized, and project's collapse in a near future become possible.
Fedora and long term support Posted Oct 18, 2008 19:32 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I don't believe a Fedora LTS will ever fly, because it has too much overlap with RHEL/Centos+EPEL, which means the ROI of such an endeavour is likely too small to attract enough contributors.
However, people could easily make the need for a "Fedora LTS" less by pursuing two efforts:
Both those efforts do not require the huge endeavour of creating yet another major distribution, just to contribute a little more to existing efforts.
Remember, both Fedora and EPEL are open community projects, their lack of features/lack of stability can always be fixed from within.
Of course that's less grand that announcing a new Foo LTS project, but I strongly suggest to forget this idea if you've not a billionaire with some pocket money invest in the idea.
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