Volunteers are calling it quits on a project called Fedora Legacy to provide long-term support for Red Hat’s hobbyist-oriented Fedora version of Linux. “The Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down,” said project organizers Jesse Keating and David Eisenstein in a Fedora Legacy mailing list posting Friday. The organizers didn’t provide a specific reason for the decision, but a lack of contributions from outside programmers contributed, Keating said in a separate mailing list posting.
Unfortunately there is little benefit in supporting older Fedora systems. So too much effort (back porting and testing lots of packages) and too little gain (small user base with little contributions) cannot be sustained for long.
Actually this is not a big loss for users. Desktop users could perform a simple “yum upgrade” get to the latest version (yes it works), and for servers you shouldn’t have used Fedora in the first place*.
* (there are better alternatives like CentOS, SuSE or Debian).
Yeah, Centos is more conservative and more stable, interesting that many hosting companies use Fedora instead of Centos. Who knows why…
Surprsingly enough, I noticed the other day that Fedora’s site might be hosted on CentOS.
http://emphaticallystatic.org/earlier/a-technical-interlude/
🙂
Hey this was a lucky and interesting find.
I just could not help smiling.
+1 to you man.
My institution certainly prefers CentOS (and RHEL, its cheap for us since we’re an academic organization) over Fedora.
Couldn’t agree more, the Linux landscape changes so quickly that legacy quickly means obsolete.
Servers are a different animal, long term, slow releases are desired there, and a legacy support network there is appreciated.
but desktop? who’s running an outdated desktop except someone with older hardware. (and if that’s you, come on! there are distro’s built for you!)
“””Couldn’t agree more, the Linux landscape changes so quickly that legacy quickly means obsolete.”””
I do not find this to be true. I have about 50 users on CentOS4 desktops. CentOS4, being essentially RHEL4, is also essentially FC3, or about 24 months “behind”.
It is quite serviceable. I am looking forward to CentOS 5 for a *few* things. But people really do over-hype the rate of progress in Open Source.
Progress in some areas is impressive, yes. But to hear some people talk, you’d think it was “The Roadrunner”. (Beep! Beep!) 😉
I second your sentiment. I would still be very happy with RHEL 4 as a desktop if it came with OpenOffice 2.x. The interesting thing is that the only reason for this “requirement” is more due to the fact that OpenOffice 1.x was pretty lacking than anything else.
Anyways, I have voiced my opinion on this forum many times about how much Fedora as a distribution really is lacking and how RedHat needs to change directions on Fedora so I won’t voice it now. The article itself is evidence of what is happening to Fedora.
Also, the lack of interest in helping out the Legacy Project is not due to some general lack of activity within the open source community. On the contrary, I think the lack of interest is specific to Fedora. RedHat did a very good job in chasing away the majority of opensource advocates from the Fedora distribution. Sure there are many Fedora users (newbies and corporations), but those are the wrong type of people.
Actually, a few months ago, and because RHEL had run beyond the 18 month release cycle that I was used to, I installed the 2.0 RPMS from the OO.o site onto my XDMCP server and things have worked out quite well. I can recommend this.
Not to criticize RedHat, BTW, as their official policy *is* 18-24 months. I simply assumed. And you know what they say about that. 😉
RedHat did a very good job in chasing away the majority of opensource advocates from the Fedora distribution. Sure there are many Fedora users (newbies and corporations), but those are the wrong type of people.
While it’s true that Red Hat did alienate some people, the primary reason why the Legacy project died is that very few users cared about it. While Fedora really is a great distribution and has a large active community, it is crafted to be most attractive to people who want bleeding edge free software. That target audience is very likely to upgrade to the latest release rather than depend on legacy support. Don’t think anyone will shed a tear that the Legacy group recognized this and shut down.
Edited 2007-01-03 00:36
If they don’t have enough people that keeps it up to date and bugs remains unpatched, fedora legacy would just create false sense of security.
If you as a user can’t make yum update and be fairly sure that recent security holes have been fixed, you better handle your upgrades yourselfs.
This is often simpler than you would think, as large parts of old SRPM .spec files can be reused to a large extent. E.g. change the version to the version of the latest upstream tarball, review the patches that fails.
In most cases this is things that allready have been included in the upstream version, so it is safe to remove the patch.
Doing this could be a way to keep old versions alive, e.g. if you have old hardware, but in most cases it would be best to just use yum to upgrade to the latest versions. This should not more dangerous than installing a servicepack in windows, but to be on the safe side, make sure you have a good backup before you do it.
Fedora has been a disaster in this sense from the very beginning.
There used to be a time when guys in the trenches formed LUGs and went and installed Linux in schools, community centers, churches and any place where a stable operating system at a low-cost was needed. This introduced lots of people to Linux and these people in turn became tomorrow’s customers, programmers or admins.
Fedora has never been usable in anything resembling a serious project or desktop. And you may say, well, if they have serious needs,let them spend serious money. However, that doesn’t work when you are trying to do community work, and it doesn’t work in the non-profit or SMB sector.
I disagree with the majority of the previous posters. There is a very strong need for a very cheap or gratis Linux desktop that is supported for a minimum of three to five years. Ubuntu’s founder here has scored a major coup by positioning the distribution as the right choice for all of the markets that I mentioned earlier.
From a philosophical and a pragmatic point of view, this is the right thing to do.
In turn, there are major benefits to providing this kind of support. This kind of support introduces Linux to anyone who is not a geek in the kinds of settings that matter: schools, offices, churches, places where lots of people will be exposed to the Linux desktop and may thus decide to run it at home or to recommend it because they have had a good first-hand experience.
Replacing a desktop every eighteen months is simply too costly in manpower and time for most “normal” people.
I am waiting for another enlightened distribution to join Ubuntu in offering three to five years of support.
Gain mind-share with the small guy and you will also win interest into your real corporate offerings.
These corporate offerings instead of being based primarily on how many years of security updates you need should be based around the idea of getting real on-site help if you have a problem. That’s something people are willing to pay money for.
Security updates alone are taken for granted and probably rightly so.
Edited 2007-01-03 00:36
Fedora has been a disaster in this sense from the very beginning.
…
Security updates alone are taken for granted and probably rightly so.
News for you before you spew more non-sense.
Fedora is a bleeding edge distro ment to satisfy people that want the latest. Its goal is and was getting hackers to work on it to get more stable RHEL. From the first moment it was said it is not suitable for corporate desktop. What you were describing were corporate usage cases not “The bleeding edge, one patch release newer than neighbours” like Fedora is. I don’t remember one single time when RH or Fedora would say like you want to picture it.
If you want to use it like that, use RHEL or CentOS. Both are derivatives made out of Fedora. One free, one proprietary, but neither would be as good if there would be no Fedora. Just pick your poison.
If you want to use it like that, use RHEL or CentOS. Both are derivatives made out of Fedora. One free, one proprietary, but neither would be as good if there would be no Fedora. Just pick your poison.
I totally agree, except for the nomenclature: RHEL costs money, but it’s not proprietary. Ask Oracle and CentOS.
There is a very strong need for a very cheap or gratis Linux desktop that is supported for a minimum of three to five years. Ubuntu’s founder here has scored a major coup by positioning the distribution as the right choice for all of the markets that I mentioned earlier.
Ubuntu’s situation may not be quite as bright as you make it seem here. About 2/3 of the packages that Ubuntu makes available belong to the “universe” repository. But these “universe” packages are only maintained by volunteers, they don’t receive security updates from the official Ubuntu developers. Also, Ubuntu developers don’t guarantee that there aren’t any release-critical bugs or security problems at the time of Ubuntu’s release in these “universe” packages.
It would be an interesting study if someone investigated the motivation of the volunteer maintainers to fix the “universe” security problems in Ubuntu’s “Long Term Support” releases. It might turn out that the volunteer-based legacy support isn’t much better in Ubuntu than it is in Fedora.
1) Users who don’t want to relearn or risk breaking what already works. Incremental fixes to small problems may be preferable to them.
2) People who maintain a large number of workstations, because it take manpower and the user may be hostile to the change.
3) Those who don’t have broadband. Just asking Fedora to update the packages for a distribution a month after it was released can be quite formidable, never mind jumping from one version to another.
4) People who are maintaining old machines or “special” machines (like those low power Mini/Nano-ITX boxen) that just don’t have the speed or memory to run the latest Gnome desktop.
Maybe Fedora users don’t fit those demographics, but it is strange to think they would not. After all, if you treat Fedora as a direct descendent of Red Hat it is one of the oldest distributions around — and that implies some degree of stability.
Oh, you’ve probably only scratched the surface on the number of groups who need long-term support. But as with anything there are tradeoffs that must be made. If you focus on long term support, what is the tradeoff? Well for one, it eats up a lot of developer time doing backporting etc. Time that could have been spent on new features.
The thing is, not every distribution needs to target the same audience. Red Hat already has other offerings that are meant for people who need long term support and of course there are lots of other distributions as well. So while Fedora really is an exceptional distribution, from the start it was made clear that long term support would be sacrificed in favor of quicker development and more emphasis on leading edge free software.
Some people absolutely hate this, but for a lot of people it’s a good fit. As far as I can tell, Fedora has the most active mailing lists of any distribution with really good community support. So fortunately it seems it’s a good fit for enough people to justify its existence.
Edited 2007-01-03 04:31
Excuse my n00bness, but what do these people do? Make sure all the new apps work with older versions of FC? If so, than the problem is not with them quiting, it’s with the system not being backwards compatible …
“””Excuse my n00bness, but what do these people do?”””
Nominally, they provided security updates for Fedora releases beyond the few months that Fedora proper deigns to do so. (Fedora has always treated support as a distasteful chore that they’d prefer not to have to do at all.)
However, the fact of the matter is that this disbanding is really only an acknowledgement of reality.
Fedora Legacy never really provided security updates on a schedule one could count upon.
Edited 2007-01-03 07:00
I think that must of you are miss the point: All of us knows that RHEL and CentOS are better for server…but this is in theory,in real world we have much more fedora in corporates (look at hosting companies!) than CentOS or RHEL.Must of the times you have no choice: Fedora is the way (and yes, fedora legacy quit is a bad)
Edited 2007-01-03 08:43
why did they choose Fedora for such uses?
Yesterday I chose to install 10g onto a derivative of the latest Fedora. The K12LTSP distribution to be exact. See: http://www.k12ltsp.org/ .
Compared to RHEL, which we run on our production servers in our data center, and CentOS, which I have used until yesterday, the K12LTSP was a sheer pleasure to work with.
If they can retire the older versions and keep improving the current Fedora – they have my vote of support.
Edited 2007-01-03 13:01
That certainly goes a long way to explaining it. I haven’t looked into that in a long while, or similar projects, and had no idea that such guys were taking in Fedora.
“””why did they choose Fedora for such uses?”””
I would guess that many chose it because they did not want to pay for RHEL, and made their decision before CentOS was well known, and before FC’s track record had been firmly established.
I am not all that in touch with ISP’s, but the typical situation for what providers I do know of who are running Ferora is that they are running something like FC2 or FC3 with their own home made web administration interface, and are simply not applying any security patches because none are available from the “vendor”. I mentioned this to a sales rep at one hosting company and he seemed shocked. He assured me that he would pass that information on to the admins immediately.
This particular provider was planning a move to RHEL4, however.
Edited 2007-01-03 17:11
One reason for all the Fedora use is that CentOS is fairly new. If you look at their site, it only covers RHEL 3 and 4. Figure many people didnt know about it until RHEL 4 came out and there you go. Rhel 4 has only been out a year (maybe 18 months). Before that if you wanted a free Red Hat compatible OS, it was Fedora. And I have had very few problems with Fedora as a server or desktop OS. Maybe I have been lucky but I dont see why people think it is so bad. Anyway, one drawback to linux in general (depending on your point of view) is that it changes quickly. Not like MS where you may be using the same exact OS for 5 years or more.
CentOS isn’t pretty new. It came out when RHEL 3 came out, although back then they were calling it cAos Linux or something silly like that.
Before RHEL 3, there was RH 9 available for free or RHEL Server 2.1 which was based on RH 7.x.
No support long term,should be expected. fedora was a free progect. But it might be time to
let fedora 7 go by the wayside
Go with Suse or other pay as you
go linux distro. [even ubuntu is
interested in long term support]
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FTA:
“If any of these hosting firms or software (companies) would put up some resources to keep Legacy going, we might not have had to shut the doors,” Keating said in another message. “Unfortunately, it’s all take, take, take and no give.”