On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 05:24:32PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On 6/12/07, Donald E Tripp <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >This is a question I hear fairly frequently on both SL and CentOS forums. 
> >Here's my two cents.

See also http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/whichlinux/ for Red Hat's
POV on the differences between RHEL and Fedora.

> >RHEL/SL/CenOS is a world class stable operating system. It got that way by 
> >being refined over time, and it stays that way from a continuos flow of 
> >quality bug fixes and updates. With a release cycle of 36 months,

more like 18-24 months, where 18 is the desired release cycle, but 24
is the effective one. In general RHEL release cycles are targeting 3
Fedora release targets, e.g. 3x6 months = 18 months. There is a
mapping like RHEL3 ~= FC0 (RHL9), RHEL4 ~= FC3, RHEL5 ~= FC6, RHEL6 ~=
FC9.

> >and life-time of 5-6 years,

7 years

> >RHEL/SL/CentOS is the desired platform for server operating systems
> >and mission critical systems.
> >
> >Fedora is like the baby brother; the one who wants all the new toys. 
> >Fedora's release cycle of 18 months puts it way ahead of any of the RHEL 
> >clones. Fedora has an estimated life-time of 3 years. I just recently read 
> >that they were dropping support for FC1 and FC2 because of lack of use / 
> >limited space. so FC3 is probably close behind.
> >
> 
> Pretty much but the Fedora release cycle is 6-9 months and the life
> cycle is estimated to be 18 to 24 months versus 3 years. FC3 and FC4
> have been end-of-lifed for a while. FC5 will be end of lifed soon. The
> future plans of Fedora will be to release regularly in October and
> April. This means that FC8 will be only a 4 month development cycle
> with a 1 month beta cycle. FC9 will be a 5 month development cycle
> with a 1 month beta cycle. Support will become 18 months I think.

Support is 13 months, or more precisely two release cycles (a 6
months) + 1 month. When the releases slip the EOL date slips as well
as to be next-to-next release plus a month. Since Fedora wants to keep
the May Day/Halloween release cycles (which is why F8 has so little
time) this means that 2 releases will almost always match up to ~12
months.

The intention is to allow Fedora users to skip a release and upgrade
from say FC5 to F7, e.g. have a 1 month window to perform yearly
upgrade instead of half-yearly.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net