[Mageia-dev] Mageia 1 EOL.

[Robert Wood]

FWIW, I agree wholeheartedly with having a longer support time. Getting 
Mageia 1 right on my laptop was a long and painful process; I feel I've 
only just got it going (OK, it's a year down the line really) and I have 
to go through it all again in a few weeks. I accept it might be much 
easier because the kernel improves at light speed, but it would much 
rather not have to do it for a while!

I run Mageia 2 on  my desktop and the one and [from my perspective] the 
only thing that is better about it is GIMP 2.8. I miss nothing 
whatsoever other than that. Even if it was two years rather than 
eighteen months it would be great.

Just my tuppence worth. I am very, very grateful for the fantastic work 
everyone does on this distribution whatever happens. :~)

On 02/12/12 06:46, blind Pete wrote:
> David Walser wrote:
>
>> 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.
> Sounds like a good reason for having a support period of either one
> and a half or two and a half release cycles.  Aiming for exactly
> an integer means that there will be a day where updating has to happen.
> Worse when there is a delay the overlap could be negative.
>
>> 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.
> One and a half release cycles?
>
> Perhaps future realeases could have;
> 9 month release cycle,
> 12 month "full" support,
> 15 months "partial" support?
>
>> 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.