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Re: time-based release freezes



Hi, Sylvain:

On Sunday 06 September 2009 17:06:24 Sylvain Sauvage wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jesús M. Navarro, dimanche 6 septembre 2009, 16:34:45 CEST
>
> >[…]
> > So you advocate for a 3 year release.  You are aware that with a 2 year
> > release and at least one year of warranteed support for oldstable you
> > already get your 3 year release "for free", don't you?
>
>   Nope. That’s not a 3 year release, that’s a 2 year release
> with 3 year support. You don’t have a _new_ 3 year warranteed
> support release after the 3 years of stable/oldstable

Neither you get "five years support" on any other distribution if you happen 
to get into one on its forth support year; you only get one more year.

I of course know that if releases are fixed each two years that means that on 
average you'll end up upgrading each two years since support for any given 
release will end up each two years.  *But* for any given release, say that 
you install "foo" the very day is officially made into Stable, then you'll be 
able to get this very release for the next three years which is more up to 
the point that it might seem in the beginning since people is not so worried 
because the "upgrade mill" (except for really short-lived distributions) but 
about any given service needing to be disrupted due to an upgrade.

No matter what, if only due to hardware constrains, a complex system will end 
up with various versions of the environment (like X, X+1 and X+2); that's 
usually a minor problem unless you end up having too many of them.

The problem comes when you have a perfectly valid service (say, an internal 
mail relay) that you don't want/need to upgrade: the longer it's supported, 
the better for you and *this* issue (which is the one most sensible on 
production environments) is already managed by the oldstable support, not by 
avaliability of new versions.


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