On 1/6/22 23:55, Frans de Boer wrote:
On 03/01/2022 09:52, Michael Ströder wrote:
HI!
Python 3.6 has reached EOL and various Python module packages already drop support for 3.6. But still Python 3.6 is planned to be shipped with Leap 15.4 instead of a newer version.
IMO this does not make sense at all.
Ciao, Michael. If I understand correctly, OpenSuse Leap is defacto (becoming) the consumer version of the Suse SLE. The latter is offered to companies willing to run software which is already outdated in it's inception and will stay that way - expect for security updates - until a "new" SLE version is distributed. After which the cycle repeats itself. That notion is missing on the OpenSuse Leap pages, since it only talks about Leap being a stable version.
In the rare instances that Tumbleweed is failing, I used to have Leap as backup but recently went to another rolling distribution because the software there was so old that it became unusable to function any longer as a backup. That said, it might be an idea that OpenSuse is rethinking it's strategy. For example, forgo the whole Leap series, which will free resources to concentrate on Tumbleweed. Also, as a suggestion, once a year repackage Tumbleweed of a few months old into a rebranded "stable" version and provide only security updates.
Given that Leap takes the core of its operating system directly from SLE it actually takes a surprisingly small amount of effort to keep going, to the point where I doubt that dropping it would result in tumbleweed being significantly better. A significant amount of work on tumbleweed is already done by SUSE employees who also maintain those packages for SLE. In fact SUSE has policies designed to ensure its employees do such. On the other hand the amount of effort to put out security updates for something new every year would be incredibly high in comparason. A significantly large number of the security updates for leap especially for security sensitive packages come directly from SLE. If we could find the resources to do this I agree it would be a great distro and probably more useful for many people then Leap and Tumbleweed. But to do this we'd need to probably find additional maintainers for most of the core packages, tumbleweed and obviously SLE are both very important to SUSE which is why they pay people such as myself to maintain packages in both. A yearly distro would be much less interesting to SUSE so they would probably be less likely to give the same support as they do to the other distros. Having said that the infrastructure is largely there so if a group of people who are passionate about this wanted to set it up it would be more then possible but as with practically everything in open source software it takes a group of people that are both passionate about it and are willing to put the time and effort in to make it happen. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B