Fedora Legacy project drops Red Hat Linux 7.2 and 8.0 support

[rkl]

Am I the only one confused by the decision of the Fedora Legacy project to suspend support for Red Hat Linux 7.2 *and* 8.0?

Apparently, no-one came forward to offer to backport security fixes for either release and they are no longer being updated (last release of anything was in mid-May from what I can see...and no kernel since February, despite many security advisories being released since then).

I can understand 7.2 being dropped - it's quite an old release and you can always jump to 7.3 via an upgrade if needs be. However, the dropping of 8.0 is a serious problem - there was no 8.1, so you need to jump a major release to 9 and, what's worse, 7.3 is older than 8.0 and yet is supported !

A quick Google for "Red Hat 7.3" finds 75,500 references, as opposed to 78.600 for "Red Hat 8.0", so anyone who claims 7.3 is much more popular than 8.0 is mistaken - they seem to be about equal in popularity to me. Logic would dictate that if they are keeping 7.3 support, they should keep 8.0 support as well simply because 8.0 is newer than and at least as popular as 7.3.

I can only hope that someone steps up to the plate and restores 8.0 support at some point - there is the Progeny service, but that's $60 a year for every machine, which is a lot for updates you're used to downloading for free.

[pigpen]

I agree with your opinion. I have a RHL8.0 box at home that runs flawlessly and I'm way too lazy
to configure a new Fedora installation to my needs. But if the decision is made to drop the support
(just confirmed that by looking at the fedoralegacy site), I'll have to swallow the pill and 'update'.
On the other hand, I have the warm feeling of having an up2date kernel and updated tools.

[Jman]

The official notice right off the site:

Red Hat Linux 7.2 and 8.0 support from the Fedora Legacy Project has been officially suspended due to lack of community involvement. While several attempts to rally community involvement have been made to date, it does not seem likely that enough involvement will appear to resume support.

Users of RHL 7.2 are urged to upgrade to RHL 7.3. Users of RHL 8.0 are urged to upgrade to RHL 9 or newer

The community wasn't into it. Many believe 7.3 was rock solid, so why support older 7.2? I'm not sure what happened at release 8. Apparently some people didn't like it.

[ewdi]

yap, 7.3 is a rock solid release, many web servers and hosting are sticking with it

[rkl]

I think Red Hat 8.0 got a bad rep just because it was a .0 release - I'm running it on several PowerEdge servers at work and it's fine (in fact, it's the only release I "trust" to get Oracle 9i properly installed on !). I think Fedora Legacy should switch to "kernel-only" updates if they must reduce support for older releases - the kernel's the only tricky thing in Linux to build from scratch. All user programs are trivial to compile from the latest source by comparison.

If you look at the situation logically, the Fedora Legacy project has shot themselves badly in the foot with this. Just because their mailing list users have 7.3 installed and not 8.0, doesn't main that it makes sense to keep support for an older release and drop support for a later one. Now if there was an 8.1 release, I could see the logic of keeping 7.3, 8.1 and 9 and dropping 7.2 and 8.0 (because you should support the last minor revision of each major release), but that's not the case here. It's a poor decision by them, IMHO.