[CALUG] irc client in Fedora 12

[Bryan J Smith]

From: Walt Smith <waltechmail at yahoo.com>
> I would disagree that I need to update F12.

I also noted you talking about issues with repositories.  That's because many 
mirrors have dropped the older, discontinued releases.

> Frankly, I don't see a great deal in Fedora-12 that I didn't see/need
> in a desktop back to Fedora 3.

Then why aren't you running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or a rebuild of it?  You 
are the person it is well designed for.  ;)

> However, I'm fascinated by the continous betterment without th
> "better" part called "changes" for lack of a better description. 

Has nothing to do with it.

Upstream (community) changes force the updates/upgrades.  The Fedora Project 
merely repackages those.  Yes, there are some upstream projects by the Fedora 
Project itself, at Fedora Hosted, Red Hat, etc..., but many things are outside 
of Fedora's control, just like any other distro.  It's upstream (community).

It takes a lot of time and money to do sustaining engineering, backporting 
security fixes from newer releases to older ones, and ensuring full ABI/API 
compatibility.  That's what Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.  Consider it instead of 
Fedora if you would prefer to stay on the same software for many years.

That's where the Enterprise Linux model came from.  Corporations needing 3, 5, 7 
and even now 10 years of fixed software ABI/API compatibility, instead of newer 
features.  It's not cheap to do, but corporations and government is willing to 
pay or someone to do it.

-- Bryan

P.S.  The side-effect is that as part of their sustaining engineering efforts is 
that as they track backports, they are also working with upstream fixes.  I.e., 
people who work on maintaining older Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages are also 
maintaining Fedora packages and upstream changes.  So the money paid to them for 
sustaining engineering is, in turn, used to fund upstream development.  It's a 
win-win situation for everyone, and flips the commercial software model.

I.e., instead of paying for new releases and features, people are paying for 
sustaining engineering of old ones.  The new releases and features are the 
"bonus" that everyone gets, and no one needs to pay for.  Red Hat has not found 
a sustainable, commercial interest for doing such, even if they crank out a lot 
of new code (along with others) at FreeDesktop.org, GNOME, etc... that goes into 
all leading edge distros beyond just Fedora, as a by-product.