> Yeah, the EOL of redhat is what convinced me to finally switch to Debian ...
> that and apt (apt for RPM always made a mess of things).

(I didn't read the previous postings in this thread closely; sorry if
this is out of context.)

Does Debian really support old Debian releases? For example, Potato was
supported for a long time. But as of June 30, it is now unsupported.

Debian also has had problems with upgrading from old versions to new
versions. It is getting a lot better now. (I should rephrase that:
Debian offers the most reliable and easiest package upgrade mechanism I
have used.) But over the past 6+ years of using Debian, I have spent a lot
of time manually updating versions of apt-get, dpkg (including having to
revert to older versions), et cetera, so the upgrades would work
correctly.

(Another example is OpenBSD: it has a consistent release every six months
and then the two releases previous -- one year old -- version becomes
dead.)

Having an end of life of old versions is definitely a good idea.
Developers (volunteers) should spend their time on new or recent code, in
my opinion.

Also, if the end-of-life'd Red Hat is really good, of course, someone
could spend their time keeping it alive and up-to-date (and fork a new
project/distro out of it). But it doesn't really seem worth it.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/