Fedora and long term support

Posted Oct 19, 2008 13:21 UTC (Sun) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

Well, I misspoke - Cally says she'd had no issues with Gaim. It was a thing named psi, which had in common that it was an instant messaging client and not much else, that got to be lagging. And that provides no evidence one way or the other, as psi wasn't (and still isn't, in Hardy) promised support, as it's from the universe section. My own earlier migration away from Dapper had more varied reasons, but desktop programs with deeply tangled library version needs and non-supported packages were the motivations I can recall; nor were those two categories non-overlapping (backporting a newer psi for Cally foundered on library version clashes, for example - I remember trying that).

Frankly, if I had it to do over again I'd have stayed on the six month upgrade cycle - it's more frequent than I'd like to have to deal with fixing the inevitable rough bits (if nothing else, making sure none of the non-supported packages haven't gone missing), but that's less annoying than waiting two years for a supported upgrade path. And yes, I've experienced the unsupported way - easier just to reinstall IME. Been there, done both, neither is fun. etc-keeper may help somewhat with restoring local configs - remains to be seen.

Ttwo years seems overlong, and five years sheer madness, given the current volatility of the Linux desktop environment - you either destabilise by trying to introduce new versions/backports (which by definition has changed the behavior somehow, otherwise you not have done it), or else you're so moribund you get wiped for a fresh install of something usable. Now servers are a little different, but I can't say anything about using Ubuntu there - mine are all running Etch. :-)