Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:17 UTC (Wed) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462)
Parent article: The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Red Hat's "one year" life cycle for their non-Enterprise distro is definitely too short for my taste. I can't get very excited about the prospect of upgrading my servers every year. However, the Enterprise distros are too expensive and I'm definitely not going to be running them for their three-plus year life cycle, if only because such a distro would be outright ancient by the time I felt I got my money's worth out of it.

Two years on a distro for my servers seems to be about right for me. Looks like I get to seek out my third choice: a distro with support that works the way I work... the way Red Hat used to.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:30 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

Good luck.. I think you are with Debian as Mandrake, SuSE, etc seem to be heading for the same terms.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 20:35 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

...although if Debian follows past suit, it will be a year and a half between stable releases anyway.

-Rob

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 3, 2003 14:29 UTC (Thu) by zipdisk (guest, #8589) [Link]

According to SuSE web pages you have at least two years of support for your
distro. Mandrake web site also mention that you will have 12 months for desktop
packages and 18 months for base packages. I don't know debian policy but i think it
must be similar somehow.

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 19:41 UTC (Wed) by skvidal (guest, #3094) [Link]

One suggestion I would make is to do this sort of thing on a community basis.
It wouldn't take the most amazing of people to watch bugtraq, watch redhat-watch and monitor the list of pkgs in 6.2, 7.0 etc and do this for only a year.

It would provide that additional year and it would give people an easier method to migrate there. Debian gets security fixes out - it's not like there is anything special about a company doing it (excluding vendor-sec which is another issue altogether)

But the point is that if you're interested in 2 yrs of security patches chances are others are too. And those people might be willing to work with you to divide the labor.

Go bug Warren Togami at the fedora project (http://fedora.us) see if he can point you at other people wanting to do security updates for older releases of red hat linux.

I think people at large can do this - they just have to be willing to try.
-sv

Two choices: too short or too long?

Posted Apr 2, 2003 23:22 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Red Hat's "one year" life cycle for their non-Enterprise distro is definitely too short for my taste.

Someone on one of the RH mailing lists suggested that RH change the life cycle to 15 months, which I think makes a lot of sense. There's a new release of RHL every 6 months or so, and providing updates for an additional 3 months would give some slack to sysadmins that have a large number of system to upgrade. With a 12 month life cycle you almost have to upgrade on every release.