On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 04:23:03PM -0400, pmkellly(a)frontier.com
wrote:
>>> There are still some systems out there that won't boot off native
>>> USB media and need CD/DVD emulation over USB to work. I don't think
>>> the time is yet ripe to jettison optical media. Soon, but not just yet.
>> How many such systems? Is it worth the cost to support them? Are users of
>> those systems in the targets for our release-blocking deliverables?
> We buy used, manufacturer refurbished PCs for the most part to keep
> costs down. They are generally 5 years old when purchased and they
> get used for another 5 or more years. They run Fedora and the
> applications we use just fine. So now it sounds like your telling me
> I need to buy newer PCs. What age limit do you propose for PCs
> before Fedora will no longer support them?
So, again, I'm looking at the target audiences for our release-blocking
deliverables. 5 years seems like a perfectly reasonable age limit for the
audiences for those. Maybe even 3 years. Do you have 5 year old computers
that don't boot from USB?
Now, it's totally within the mission of Fedora
<
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/> to enable people who care
about targetting older hardware to develop, produce, and support solutions
for that. That would be super, super awesome. If you're interested in
finding other people with similar needs and want to build that, I'm totally
in favor of doing that as part of Fedora, with Fedora resources, using
Fedora infrastructure.
> Oh I forgot to add in my prior replies on this subject that we used
> DVDs for long term backups too.
This isn't about whether DVD writing works, though. In fact, it's not
necessarily about dropping support for DVD installation either -- it's
*likely* that it will just keep working, and even if we ship a release which
you discover after the fact doesn't work for you, there's nothing blocking
producing a fix. We just wouldn't slip the release for it.
Ok, so ISO images would still be produced and could be burned to OM
for installation. There just isn't any guarantee (at release) that the
OM would actually boot and one could squawk it if it didn't and not be
poo-poo'd about it. I might be able to survive that, assuming that the
fixes for the unbootability (is that a word?) were timely.
I'm sorry for opening such a storm of messages here. I'm just a bit
sensitive to this as I'm the one that generally gets poked with the
sharp, pointy stick when the defecation hits the impeller around here.
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