On 8/9/24 04:48, Andreas Stieger via
openSUSE Users wrote:
On 2024-08-09 13:32, Carlos E. R. wrote:
There is no request to maintain old
things, but to not delete them, to
just freeze and leave an archive, out of the mirror structure
perhaps.
No resources from the OBS.
That is work. If you need it, do it.
Do tell? What ongoing work is needed to maintain an archive? How
much work is involved to make a snapshot and archive a repository?
Doesn't seem like it should involve a lot of work by someone who
groks SuSE's repositories. Your suggestion "If you need it, do it"
is crass and impracticable for us simple users. I imagine it would
be a steep learning curve to understand the whole repository
architecture, design, software, and testing procedures, let alone
get qualified to make changes to the repository structures! What
would take an expert a few minutes to accomplish would take me
days/weeks to do.
And about irresponsibility, me for
instance have old distros in
"decommissioned" computers, like the old laptop that I only use
to see
movies in front of the static exercise bike. It serves no
purpose to
update it.
And this example invalidates my point.. how exactly?
I have systems, like Carlos, that are in a working state, but also
are remote and difficult to access. These systems are basically
robots, doing the same thing and supporting services that don't
really need to be changed. They work, as is, and simply don't need
to be changed very much! Upgrading them involves a high risk of
breakage, trying to adapt software, configurations, etc to
new/changed interfaces, deprecated and removed software, etc. I
could write a book about all the "breakages" and the time it takes
to grok and integrate new software interfaces and configurations,
after doing an upgrade to a new release. Keeping backwards
compatibility doesn't seem to be a requirement of OpenSuSE releases
anymore. You are also implying that keeping downtime to a minimum,
while doing an upgrade, is no longer a priority of the OpenSuSE
development and maintenance teams either. So your "point" is
invalidated by the necessity of keeping a system in a running state,
often referred to as the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra.
Yes there may be security fixes and other flaws in an older version
of OpenSuSE, but these facts may be outweighed by other
concerns/issues. IMHO your argument, to force users to upgrade,
whenever a new release of OpenSuSE comes out, does a big disservice
to users who simply can't keep up. Now I got to worry about even
older OpenSuSE systems I support, will I be even able to upgrade
them when intermediate repositories are being abandon, or not
archived?
Also, I have a system, my laptop, that I simply can't upgrade.
Attempting to upgrade breaks and the newer version of OpenSuSE will
not install properly or in a runable state. I don't have the
knowledge to try an fix the problem myself, and others can't help
because they do not experience the failure I am having. So what am I
suppose to do when I can't upgrade?
BTW, I do understand the risks of not being able to ask for support
on older versions of OpenSuSE, that's fair and I accept it. But to
handicap users, by removal of older repositories, and access to
stuff in them, IMHO is NOT a fair way to treat users. Especially if
it doesn't/shouldn't involve a lot of extra work just to archive a
repository, as is, when the release is deprecated.
I think it is fair to ask, if a tool was available for an older
version of OpenSuSE, it should remain available for that older
version, in some kind of archive/repo until perhaps storage space is
overwhelmed.
Marc...
Andreas