[SLL] Fedora Legacy going away?

[Jesse Keating]

On Monday 01 January 2007 09:36, Brian C. Lane wrote:
> "The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being
> re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older
> Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and
> earlier distributions are no longer being maintained."
>
>
> Seems to me that this is a pretty serious change of direction. I know
> that there are a considerable number of colocation sites using various
> versions of Fedora Core (yaya, they should be using RHEL | /dev/null).
> Does anyone have any more detail on this than their short announcement?
> Are freshrpms or Dag Wieers going to pick up handling updates, or is it
> time to upgrade everything to Debian?

We've been discussing the fate of Legacy for probably over a year now, mostly 
on fedora-legacy-list.  We've shut down mostly due to there being no 
volunteers from the community to do the work necessary to get updates out.  
Legacy started as a community project, and initially got lots of volunteers, 
those that were running RHL releases, and early Fedora releases.  Over time, 
it would seem that sysadmins wised up and if they needed longer than a year 
or so of updates, they went to CentOS or RHEL or whatever, and the need for 
Legacy waned.  So much that no more volunteers were out there to help produce 
the updates.

The Fedora project is merging Core and Extras together into one package pool, 
and redesigning how we do releases.  Part of this is extending the lifespan 
from 9 months to 13 months (ish, based on release dates of next releases, not 
actual time) so that one could potentially way on say Fedora 7, wait until a 
month after Fedora 9 comes out, and then upgrade to Fedora 9.  This usage 
scenario should satisfy the vast majority of current Legacy users, and 
obviates the need for Legacy.

Had these colo sites you mentioned actually CARED about their users and making 
sure updates were available, they would have been on Fedora Legacy lists, 
they would have been volunteering time/people/resources to the project on the 
numerous times the project has made an open call for these.  The fact is 
these are nothing more than leech companies, leeching free software, leeching 
free updates, and not making any effort to return any of the favors.  In the 
end, the loser is the user and that is very unfortunate, but we just can't in 
good faith keep the project open when we know that it is not possible to keep 
up with reasonable updates to bugs that are coming in, and we consider it 
best to just end the project outright.

As for upgrading to Debian, you should only do that if there is a compelling 
thing about Debian you wish to use.  Changing distro styles because of this 
seems silly, when there are things like CentOS which provide the same 
lifespan as RHEL but for free (you just don't get any support, which you 
didn't with Fedora either).

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
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