On 2010-12-05 19:19:24 (+0000), Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@web.de> wrote:
Kim, stop sending private copies of emails and learn how to properly quote previous emails!
On 04/12/10 18:24, Kim Leyendecker wrote:
Well, I think a LTS version isn´t so good. I mean, companies will use SLES and/or SLED.
You obviously haven't read and/or haven't understood what I wrote. There are a lot of companies out there which do not use SLES and/or SLED. Nobody said an openSUSE LTS or openSLES would replace a standard openSUSE for the home end user. It would of course be a complementary package, bridging the gap between standard openSUSE and SLES/SLED.
Correct. And if I may add a few things... The nature of the beast highly depends on whether it's an "openSLES" (which would be binary compatible with SLES, same as CentOS for RHEL (*)) or an "openSUSE LTS". The latter would *not* be binary compatible to SLES, and have nothing to do with SLES altogether (which is why that option is fine with everyone from a "political" point of view). It is "just" an openSUSE with a longer lifetime. The target audience of an "openSUSE LTS" (**) is not going to be the "home user". Such long(er) lifetime releases are mostly meant for people/admins running openSUSE on servers and, even more specifically, on hosted environments, where you do not have physical access and where upgrading is always a risky undertaking. The other reason is that, if we take that option, we would start with a small set of "core" packages (stuff like kernel, coreutils, ...), simply because we most probably wouldn't have enough contributors to maintain a larger set of packages (e.g. KDE, GNOME, X.org, ...). That is a lot more useful than one might think: if we end up with such a small/"core" system, we can have it as a build target on build.opensuse.org and, hence, provide the newest packages for e.g. apache2, php5, mysql, etc... based on what is already maintained there. It wouldn't be backported patches, but newer versions. Personally, when I think of the hosted server scenarios I'm involved with, it would suit my needs perfectly well. Those "core" packages _must_ be maintained anyway, even if one aims for a desktop oriented LTS. And it's also something to begin with, and we'll see whether that proves to be successful or a bad idea altogether. As Wolfgang wrote in his blog post, the main idea here is to actually _try_ to do it, not discuss every potential problem and approach to death and, then, never actually try to implement it. That being said, if "openSUSE LTS" proves to be successful, nothing prevents more contributors to join the team and maintain more packages, even stuff like KDE or GNOME or ... (*) although, in practice, it's far from being as binary compatible to RHEL as one might think (**) really need to come up with a better name, it has nothing to do with what Canonical is doing for their Ubuntu LTS, and might sound misleading in that regard) -- what about "openSUSE EL" (Extended Lifetime) ? Hope this clarifies some blurry details :) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser@opensuse.org> /\\ http://opensuse.org -- I took the green pill _\_v FOSDEM XI: 5 + 6 Feb 2011, http://fosdem.org