Fedora 10 Is No More

All good things must come to an end, they say, and that is true of software as much as anything else. As new releases supplant the old, legacy versions receive a stay of execution to allow users the time to test and upgrade gracefully. When their time has come, however, they land in the coder's graveyard, which is exactly where the aging Fedora 10 found itself last week.

Fedora's legacy support policy is to support any given version until two new versions have been released, plus one month — the time-frame generally runs to thirteen months. Shortly thereafter, the old release is sent on its way: security and bug-fix patches are discontinued, and users are strongly urged to upgrade immediately. With the release of Fedora 12 in mid-November, the one-month countdown began for Fedora 10, and it received its final updates last week.

The official announcement of the release's retirement came on Friday, in the form of an email from Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields to the fedora-announce mailing list:

This announcement is a reminder that as of 2009-12-17, Fedora 10 has
reached its end of life for updates. As planned, last update pushes
to Fedora 10 were made in advance of this date, to accommodate the
move of some Fedora infrastructure.

Frields went on to note that the new legacy version, Fedora 11, will be supported until after Fedora 13 has been released.
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Justin Ryan is the News Editor for Linux Journal.
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