Got an email from mjcox describing the end of life policy for various redhat releases including the recently released Redhat 8.0 (Psyche). According to the policy, Redhat is going to end-of-life (in terms of errata support) all their releases within 12 months of their release. For now, all their current releases are being EOL'ed on Dec 31st 2003.

Whilst I understand the motivations behind this, I feel that 12 months is too less. Obviously, Redhat would like people to switch to Redhat Advanced Server and Redhat Advanced Workstation which are going to have longer EOL periods, however one of the reasons (cost) of switching from Windows to Linux goes away since RHAS is around $900/server.

The suprising thing is that barring Linuxtoday, none of the news site such as Slashdot, LWN have posted any news on this.

I guess I should file a bugzilla RFE for up2date so that it can do at up2date --distrib-upgrade. Reinstalling the entire machine every year is going to make a lot of sysadmins quite unhappy