On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:46:54PM +0100, Pascal Bleser wrote:
Oh yeah, here is *that* topic again ;) (and make sure to read Greg's post about Tumbleweed as well, as it is a similar kind of project, even though they are diametrically opposed ;D)
They are only opposed in how it works, they both aim to solve a need that people have for how they use Linux, so I see no objection to LTS at all.
With "openSUSE LTS", the idea is, as Wolfgang already explained in his blog post, to pick up an openSUSE release when Novell (and the community) stops supporting it, when it goes EOL, which is after 18 months as of now. The effort can be a bit daunting, as it means keeping track of security vulnerabilities, backport fixes for those, or possibly upgrade to a newer version when backporting is too much work (e.g. Firefox). That's pretty much what is being done by the SUSE Security team and us (the community) during the lifetime of a release. But for longer and, hence, it is also more work (the older the packages, the more work it is to backport). The infrastructure provided on build.opensuse.org would certainly come in very handy. Especially when it'll have patch support :)
This is a worthy goal, but yes, it will take a lot of work. I think it would be harder to achieve this than the other proposal.
"openSLES" is a totally different beast, as it means using the source packages of a SLES release and rebrand them. The obvious advantage is that it would most presumably be less work, as the hard work will already have been done by the Security team and the staff at Novell that does the SLES maintenance. But it would also be a rogue project: Novell cannot legally prevent anyone from doing just that as, albeit you do need a subscription to have access to them, the updates are also available as source packages. Nevertheless, it is not something Novell would like to see happening as they (or at least a few people I've talked to about it) believe it could be hurting their SLES business. While I don't personally share that opinion, and before 100 people comment negatively on this, it is a *fact* that no one can give any assurance or hard proof that it will not hurt the SLES business. Yes, we all know about CentOS, and a few know a few things about CentOS and Redhat I won't be citing in public (but let's say that some people who might or might not be working for Redhat have or haven't said that they believe that CentOS is effectively helping them spreading RHEL, but only off the record. or not.). But there are no hard facts or numbers to give any proof or guarantee that it would be the same with an "openSLES". And, personally, the last thing I'd want is people from Novell/SUSE losing their job because of that. Furthermore, Novell would clearly not be supportive of such a move, and it's not sure whether we would be able to use resources such as build.o.o for it.
Don't be so sure of this at all. I can't speak for anyone else here, and I am not speaking as Novell at all, but I can tell you that if you wish to persue this option, I will be glad to personally help you if you run into resistance from Novell in any way for this project. It should _not_ be anything that Novell should be resistant to having happen. Again, personally, I think this is both the "easier" option, as well as the better one to do. Best of luck with this, greg k-h -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org