-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Wolfgang me preguntó si algunos de los que dejaron de usar opensuse les interesaría ayudar en esto. - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:46:54 +0100 From: Pascal Bleser <> To: opensuse-project@opensuse.org Subject: [opensuse-project] openSUSE LTS 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) Wolfgang Rosenauer (our local firefox/mozilla hero) made an interesting post on his blog, in case you're not following http://planet.opensuse.org (shame on you!): http://www.rosenauer.org/blog/2010/11/30/community-powered-long-term-support... Stop here. Please read that post. Done? OK, here are my 0.02EUR to that. The idea of an "openSUSE LTS" and/or "openSLES" aren't new indeed, and I suppose that most can remember the discussions around it some time ago. And from here on, by "LTS", I (and Wolfgang) mean "longer than 18 months" ;) There are basically two options on how to achieve that, from a technical perspective: 1) an LTS based on openSUSE 2) a rebranded SLES 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 :) "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. Long story short, I personally believe that the only viable option is "openSUSE LTS", but it does bring some technical challenges which require a certain number of committed contributors working on the maintenance. I really concur with Wolfgang's idea/proposal to start off with a server-oriented subset/core of openSUSE and try to keep that maintained for half a year or more, and learn from that experience to see whether we can realistically take on doing that for a longer period of time. Ideas, (constructive) criticism? :) (and thanks for reading so far, I know my mails are way too long) cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser <> /\\ http://opensuse.org -- I took the green pill _\_v FOSDEM XI: 5 + 6 Feb 2011, http://fosdem.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.12 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkz2UUsACgkQtTMYHG2NR9UZtACdGLbRch4FhF5qyKRpnatq1SxY 8rkAmwdeY4gK0xSjzSQVQnwSZFX5y4hN =hanc -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----