On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@gmail.com> wrote:
A better proposal than yours in my mind would be for Evergreen supported openSUSE releases not have their sources in OBS renamed to discontinued until evergreen support drops.
Yes. This is simply the union of what we both want :)
There is a current discussion thread on opensuse-project where it looks like 11.4 is likely to be designated the next evergreen release.
Evergreen is a great idea and I like it. My only problem is that it shouldn't have to exist. Let me try to be a little bit philosophical... I think this quote from Carlos (on opensuse-project) hints at the root cause of all the trouble: "Carlos E. R." <> wrote:
No, the team doing the dev and packaging have different goals than a long time support.
According to this statement, package maintainers are not interested in working towards the goal of stable versions of packages running on stable long term versions of openSUSE. However, I'm not sure that's actually true. Why? First, it is worth observing that the very nature of OBS makes it difficult to pursue that goal. Because in OBS, for any project/package there is only one spec file - and therefore package version - for ALL repositories. In other words, it would be impossible for a maintainer to configure a package to build foobar-1.2 on openSUSE 11.3 but foobar-2.1 on openSUSE 12.1. So what happens? They either try to shoehorn foobar-2.1 onto 11.3, with lots of resulting build issues, or if that becomes too hard they just drop support for 11.3 or leave the build broken. Some brave projects are willing to spawn sub-projects for each openSUSE version, e.g. Virtualization:openSUSE11.3. But this is unwieldy and hard to manage, and as a result most projects don't bother to do this. (dreaming) Why not let each project be a simple git repo, with a branch for each repository, defaulting to 'master' if no such branch were defined? (back to reality) In other words, I'm suggesting we think about how improving the structure of OBS might make it easier to please everyone, instead of forcing a bias against long term support. -Archie -- Archie L. Cobbs -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+owner@opensuse.org