Benjamin Franz wrote:
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think
would be more effective?
Despite Redhat's protestations that Fedora isn't just RHEL
beta/technology testbed, in practice that is how it is perceived.
Perhaps we'd be better off if everyone agreed on the process. If you
are doing development work and want to build and test against something
on the way to being the next stable versions that your code will run
under, you'll want to use fedora. If you want to take advantage of the
latest many thousands of man-hours of development work in desktop
applications on a not-too-critical desktop you'll want fedora or some
equally fast-paced distro.
Each
Fedora is supported just long enough to 'get stable' and transfer
technology to RHEL, and then the end user is forced to do an OS upgrade.
There just aren't enough people who love reving the OS every 12 to 18
months to a newly unstable release make that viable.
If you pay attention to your local changes and how to re-create them
after the new install, this can be a fairly easy operation. It is
particularly easy if you have a spare machine and can overlap running
the old and new versions. The question is just whether or not it is
worth the trouble. If you don't care about the new stuff, then probably
not.
I'm running FC5/FC6 on my desktops right now: I've been running RH since
the RH4/5 days (I used Slackware before that back to 1995). But my next
upgrade will probably not be Fedora but either CentOS5 or Ubuntu7
(assuming an LTS version is released by then).
Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual
experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out
updates painlessly across versions with big changes.
If Redhat really wants their technology testbed for RHEL to reach an
expanding rather than a shrinking audience, they are going to have to
bite the bullet and provide some method for inexpensive support for at
least security patches for an extended time ala the old RH boxed sets. I
realize they have a problem with it cannibalizing RHEL (which is their
cash cow), but CentOS and Ubuntu are already doing a great job of that
right now.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters
to anyone? There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS
if you don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential
future RHEL customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more
if use fedora. They need people who use and test the added features,
but what do they gain by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into
yet another old version.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
