[Mageia-dev] Mageia 1 EOL.

[blind Pete]

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.

-- 
blind Pete
Sig goes here...