On 16 November 2015 at 17:51, Felix Miata
Richard Brown composed on 2015-11-16 16:32 (UTC+0100):
Ken Schneider wrote:
Richard Brown wrote:
Evergreen will extend the supported lifetime of 13.1 for another year
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen#Supported_distributions
I guess we not know for sure until 13.1 is officially accepted into the Evergreen project.
Based on the previos supported versions the was a 2-3 years support lifetime not just one.
I can tell you, based on my conversations with Wolfgang Rosenauer (who is one of the main Evergreen Maintainers) that he seems to be putting all of his interest and energies into Leap.
Leap offers only a subset of what the entire long term release-using universe wants, omitting the 32 bit arch that would allow all openSUSE users to continue being supported openSUSE users for the foreseeable future. This is part of the reason for this thread's OP.
Then the 'entire long term release-using universe' needs to find maintainers, developers, and hardware willing to provide long term support for a dying architecture. We're not the only Project that has taken 2015 as an opportunity to drop official support for 32-bit Intel, and while I will not object to any community initiated attempt to find a way to continue support for a little longer, anyone who thinks 32-bit intel has some long term future has a very different view on the world than most.
Given the timing of how Leap was announced after Evergreen support for 13.1 was already announced, I'm not surprised the expected end date for Evergreen 13.1 is a lot shorter than Evergreen 11.4
Given the history of Evergreen lifetimes, if I were doing a fresh installation now, it would be tough to decide on the better gamble. Evergreen 11.4 continues to accept patches. Its repos contain updates provided as recently as last month. Had I had advance knowledge of this extended life, I would not have abandoned 11.4 for 13.1.
Given the evolution transpiring since 13.1 was selected as the Evergreen to follow 11.4, and that 13.2 looks to be the last ever stable openSUSE release for all current openSUSE users, maybe "official" Evergreening 13.1 should be skipped, replaced by 13.2. This might inconvenience current 13.1 users. However, those who installed 13.1 early on planned to have official support continue only until May 2016. Already they have had an extra 6 months official support, with planned Evergreen start delayed by same 6 months, without the planned Evergreen termination also being delayed.
Given the switch from 8 month to 12 month planned release cycles, maybe a better plan would be an extended official 13.1 support period, possibly until May 2016 to give 13.1 users ample time to switch to 13.2, and make 13.2 the Evergreen to follow 11.4, unless 13.2 too will eventually become an Evergreen.
The 13.1 official release cycle will not be extended any more - as it was based on the release schedule of other products (2 releases + 2 months), the current official end date of Jan 2016 is already much later than it was expected when we released 13.1 (26 months vs the expected lifetime of 18 months) With the extra 10 months planned for Evergreen 13.1 that leads to a total lifetime of 36 months for openSUSE 13.1.. and that's not bad at all for a community release If you want longer than that, then my advice is to find people to track, fix, build, test, publish, and support 13.1 for longer..it's a lot of work, one of the reasons I think Wolfgang is glad Leap is trying to address some of the use cases he was using Evergreen for ;) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org