All,

Is anyone interested in attempting to change openSUSE's release maintenance periods and increase the Evergreen release support timeframe to make it easier for Small Medium Businesses SMB to implement? Every SMB we can migrate over to evergreen becomes a potential future SUSE Enterprise and their input into the distro will certainly help steer it into better supporting their businesses.

Currently openSUSE Evergreen releases can range from 3-4 years of support but 3 is essentially guaranteed.

Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, both The Server and Desktop versions will receive 5 years support.

We are currently slightly shorter by around two years for Evergreen LTS releases, as the next Evergreen release is also free of cost and openSUSE upgrades do work rather well. I do not really see needing to provide a hard 5 year guarantee.

I would like to see openSUSE start using the Major.0 release again and possibly move to this type of release cycle.

14.0 Evergreen Release 14.1 Developer/Tester/Enthusiast Release targeted to development of the next Evergreen 14.2 Developer/Tester/Enthusiast Release targeted to development of the next Evergreen 14.3 Developer/Tester/Enthusiast Release targeted to development of the next Evergreen 15.0 Evergreen Release 15.1 Developer/Tester/Enthusiast Release targeted to development of the next Evergreen 15.2 = 14.0 Evergreen EOL

This would put Evergreen under maintenance support for a period of 6 releases and provide a 2 release stabilization period before users would have to migrate approximately 18 Months. Most businesses that utilize Windows wait until Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2 to migrate to enhance stability and fix design flaws so this would help put us on par with Microsoft some.

There was once take about creating a service pack system for SUSE when Novell owned SUSE. I don't know what happened with it but we could look at releasing a updated DVD installer (15.0.1) with in conjunction with the 15.2 releases this would just be a software defect fix incorporating the first 12 months of updates from the maintenance period. To assist users in migrating between evergreen versions and provide extra emphasis on openSUSE's maintenance support. If a new DVD installer is not desirable then possibly a just a add-on installation CD or DVD that contains all the openSUSE patches that were released in the first year so it can be downloaded added as an additional installation source and used to quickly apply all the relevant updates. I personally like the idea of releasing a Evergreen updated Installation medium on a 12 month cycle and using a third point number so this could be treated as an equal to a service pack slipped streamed installation medium to speed up installation times.

For the minor update releases they are currently supported for around 18 months (2 releases + 2 months).

I would rather see these change to (1 release + 6 months). Most users do not keep minor releases for 18 months. Keeping them maintained for 18 months does use up resources even with OBS.

I think we should treat the 3 minor update release's as the proving ground developer/tester/enthusiast targeted releases to work up to the new Evergreen release. In conjunction with this we could put together a long term goal section on the Wiki for the next Evergreen release instead of only using the goals per release cycle.

The goal of The openSUSE Project of course is not to produce a perfect Enterprise Distribution with older stable software but to produce a good quality all around distribution allowing for newer software and exciting new features to be included.