Max Spevack blogs fedora core 6 end of life is december 7:
Those of you who dont read the fedora-devel-announce list but who do read Fedora Planet will probably be interested in this reminder: Fedora 8 will be released on Thursday November 8th, 2007. According to our policy of “supporting release X until one month after release X 2”, Fedora Core 6s end of life date will be Friday December 7th, 2007. Fedora Core 6 Zod was released on October 24th, 2006. Its total supported lifespan will end up being 13.5 months. Fedora 7 will be supported until about 1 month after Fedora 9 is released.
This is the Paradox of Change: we want our software to evolve, keep moving forward, improving, but we hate the costs of upkeep. Backup, reinstall, reconfigure, restore, tweak, update, etc. is a long process, though worthwhile. Bear in mind that this is fedora’s legacy: it’s for folks who like to surf the cutting edge, at the cost of flatten-and-restore. If you want more stable choices, there are many, at the cost of not getting to play with (and risk getting cut on the sharp edges of) the latest stuff.
Someone at last Thursday’s LUG meeting asked about the feasibility of upgrading an Ubuntu install done “middle of last year” with the latest 7.10 release, and the folks were skeptical, at best. I recently tried an in-place upgrade of 7.04 to 7.10, but that was a pretty clean and fresh install and it went well. Others have not been so fortunate. The best practices of Freemanizing™ a machine (backup, format, install from scratch, clean installs of new versions, copy over data, preferences, scripts and settings) still has some merit, I think.