On 9/4/23 15:36, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-09-04 04:09, Simon Lees wrote:
On 9/3/23 15:54, Richard Brown wrote:
On 2023-09-03 02:45, Simon Lees wrote: With Granite not coming until 2025 and there being no plan for a Leap 15.7, there would be a high risk of having no option for Leap users for a year or two while your idea takes form, gets developed and then released
Well from my maths a 15.6 mid 2024 + 18 months of support lands us at the end of 2025 and while now is probably too early to work on something I'd hope that we'd be able to work on something in parallel with granite development through 2025 so that we have something viable by the end of 2025, As long as all the key components of Granite are in place I also wouldn't rule out trying to release something a little before the granite release maybe within the Beta period if it helps with time frames. This might not meet every need of every existing Leap user but it would certainly be my goal to meet the needs of as many as we reasonably can so there is atleast some choice for people who don't wish to move to full tumbleweed.
Of course from these numbers we might not get the general 6 months we have for migration between current point releases but unless Granite releases in December of 2025 hopefully we can get more then a month. If toward the end of 2025 we look like we have a viable replacement but might ideally need a little more time for migration then i'd certainly consider getting the board to approach SUSE about maybe the possibility of moving from 18 months of support to maybe 21 for 15.6. But either way at this stage i'm certainly not seeing a period where there'd be a year or two of completely unsupported systems.
Given how similar the planned approach is to Leap and the fact we were able to put together a prototype in a week based off just the Marble codebase the design is mostly there and really all we are waiting for is some up to date ALP sources to hit OBS it doesn't really need to be all of Granite either if we just start working with a smaller subset of packages until the core of ALP starts to land and we build more on top of it.
There are teams (including one with your dayjobs Teamlead) looking at topics for Granite like:
- reducing the packages delivered in Granite to make it more sustainably supportable - “compartmentalising” software stacks so SUSE may use different versions of stuff from the users, enabling different lifecycles either for SUSE or the users over the lifespan of Granite
Of this i'm well aware given that I have also been involved in both workgroups (although not always in the meetings due to timezones).
Neither of the above will apply to Marble.
On the contrary compared to what I was expecting when I did my prototype and basing of marble, every discussion around package selection was working around a significantly smaller and harder package set to deal with then what's being discussed for Granite currently. Yes how we work with compartmentalization long term is a challenge that still needs to be addressed, however I highly suspect for atleast the initial release of Granite there will probably only be one of most stacks. But yes how we tell a project which packages to ignore is something to solve in the next 18 months. Ideally we will be able to start pulling openSUSE packages from Tumbleweed at the same time or a similar time as they are so the "Factory First" if Factory works so does everything else still applies. But there maybe some things that need addressing yes.
If either of these efforts has any impact on the Granite codebase then I expect your proposed timeline above to be utterly infeasible.
I expect both efforts to have a dramatic impact on the internals of Granite even if the end goal is that users won’t see much of a difference compared to a SLES major release.
I really do not share your optimism at all that the openSUSE Project will have the time, resources or capability to design, build, and make a reliable new distro based on Granite before the end of life of Leap 15.6
Well i'm the sort of person that will take the goal of having a distro based on Granite before the end of 15.6 and push my hardest to resolve the issues to get there and if come September / October 2025 that is looking unlikely i'd start to look at temporary work arounds to bridge the gap. This could include asking SUSE nicely if they'd consider a one off extension to 15.6 support to help "Bridge the Gap", or maybe it could involve a "temporary rolling setup" based on the current state of where we get to that people may chose to use until we get to the point of being able to coin a stable release. Yes these options are less then ideal and the first might not even be possible but personally for my own needs i'd happily take less then ideal over nothing.
If I thought that was a viable option I absolutely wouldn’t be doing what I have been trying to bring folk together to build a Leap replacement.
And I'm aiming to bring people together to work on proving that it is a viable option. Or atleast enough of a viable option to meet the needs of those willing to contribute. The History of Leap shows that even if we can achieve that standard for a small number of contributors we can come up with something that is quite useful for users. -- 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