[Mageia-dev] Mageia 1 EOL.

[David Walser]

Pierre Jarillon wrote:
> Le dimanche 2 décembre 2012 01:11:44, Thomas Backlund a écrit :
>> Mageia 1 is now EOL.
>> 
>> BS is locked down and updates_testing wiped.
>> 
>> Blog post pushed and mail sent to updates-announce ML.
> 
> I have several systems installed with Mageia 1 and I wish to move them to 
> Mageia 3 (I make always a new install). During 4 or 5 month, I agree to have 
> no improvements or no bug corrections but security updates are useful.
> 
> I dont' want to replace Mga1 with Mga2 and 4 month later play again for Mga2 
> to Mga3. I have also other machines with Mga2 and with Mandriva 2010.2.
> I dont need a LTS but a Short Term Support is a bad thing and I don't want to 
> waste my time.
> 
> Is it possible to have security updates until a month after Mga3 is out?

My feeling on this is that we have an 18 month support cycle *because* we have a 9 month development cycle, so we support for the length of 
two release cycles, so that if one release causes major problems, or you don't have time to upgrade every single time, you can skip one 
release and still stay supported.  This works fine unless a release gets delayed like Mageia 2 did (which is fine) and probably most will a 
little bit at least.  I believe the support should continue to run until release+2 is out.

The problem is there isn't a company with paid employees providing the support, it's a community distro with all volunteers, so we can only 
continue to provide support if there are people willing and able to do the work.

As you may know, I do a lot of the packaging work on security updates.  I also depend on some other packagers to do some of that work, but as 
time passes, less and less of them have either the time or willingness to continue to work on Mageia 1, so it gets more difficult to continue 
to support everything as time passes.  Also, even if we can get updates packaged, we need QA people to test them, and we continue to need 
more help with QA, as it's a very small number of people doing the vast majority of the work.  QA is responsible for not only testing updates 
for stable distros, but also testing every single ISO (including alphas, betas, and RCs) we release.

So, to make a long story short, extending support for Mageia 1 was discussed by the council, but unfortunately rejected, mostly IINM because 
of the burden on QA.  Again, that's not to blame anyone, but QA is a lot of work that's done by few people.  So if they're not willing or 
able to continue to support it, unless new people step up to fill that void, we just don't have the ability to continue to provide support.

As the person who does a lot of the packaging for security updates, I am willing to continue the work I do on it, especially since I haven't 
had time yet to move my and my family's workstations to Mageia 2, and probably won't until late December, but I don't have a way to 
distribute any new packages.  The build system has closed for Mageia 1.  SVN should still be open, so I suppose I could check things in there 
and anyone interested could build from it locally?  I don't want to host my own repository somewhere.