On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Jos Poortvliet <jos@opensuse.org> wrote:
The point is this: SUSE is the one who pays for openSUSE's lifetime. As in, SUSE pays the people working on security updates and fixes. SUSE pays the server space and processing power. We are committed to pay for keeping 2 openSUSE versions maintained and alive with a few months bonus. We're not going to pay for more as it is expensive and doing so would cut in our income - we're not exactly trying to kill our own company and land all our engineers on the street.
Hmm... I think there is a subtlety here that is worth mentioning... I realize security updates and fixes are costly, but for me that's actually not as important as simply having basic access to the repositories. In other words, I don't have a problem with SUSE not actively supporting 11.3 with updates and security fixes. For example, I have one 11.3 system which is working fine and only accessible from the outside world via SSH. So the only security issues I need to worry about are SSH bugs, and fortunately those are few and far enough between that I can manage them myself. What really hurts though is that the existing 11.3 repos of every OBS project were unilaterally deleted, which means now I can no longer even build 11.3 machines. So here's my question: why not let 11.3 just "live on", without any official maintenance? Let the laggards like me who continue to use it worry about security fixes and updates. And let each OBS project decide when supporting 11.3 builds is too much of a pain, instead of deciding for them. It seems that doing this this would only require a little more disk space and CPU power. It would allow lots of people who rely on stable systems to continue to be able to build and maintain those systems. As you pointed out, disk and CPU are not primary drivers of what gets kept, "actively maintained" is. So declare 11.3 "actively maintained but without updates or security fixes" and we're done. This would be analogous to RedHat's "Extended Life Phase" (which RHEL 4 will enter in February): see https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ This seems like a simple compromise that would address most of what both sides of this discussion want. What do you think? -Archie -- Archie L. Cobbs -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+owner@opensuse.org