Fedora and long term support [LWN.net]

Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 18, 2008 2:17 UTC (Sat) by Nord (guest, #35114)
In reply to: Fedora and long term support by sbergman27
Parent article: Fedora and long term support

> 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.
LTS version could help to escape this (yet theoretical but very probable) final for Fedora. It would be a very viable choice once taken.

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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:
contribute to EPEL, so the feature gap between Fedora and RHEL/Centos gets smaller
contribute to Fedora stabilization and in-place transparent update efforts, so the "danger" (real or perceived) or arriving at the end of a Fedora cycle diminishes

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.