On Saturday, January 28, 2012 06:40:15 Brian K. White wrote:
On 1/27/2012 11:47 AM, Archie Cobbs wrote:
On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Claudio Freire
wrote: On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Archie Cobbs
wrote: In which case, I think we should survey our community and see how many people are happy with the rapid deathcycle of openSUSE releases.
I'm guessing there are many others out there who would like to "redefine" it.>> Why not bring evergreen into the equation?
Ie: synchronize EOL with incorporation into evergreen.
Right now the real problem is that 11.3 isn't in evergreen. If it was, all this would be moot.
Read this[0] thread. It requires quite a lot of manpower to be able to do so. Evergreen needs more people. So, gather volunteers. It's about backporting patches, IIRC, not major development.
[0] http://lists.rosenauer.org/pipermail/evergreen/2012-January/000560.ht ml> Evergreen is a noble idea, with a good number of people interested (see thread above), yet it has stalled and there seem to be no plans by the OBS team to accommodate the idea.
Really, the fact that Evergreen even exists is ridiculous.
There are a bunch of people who need basic openSUSE repo availability to last more than 1.5 years, but their needs are not being addressed.
And it seems like such a simple thing! But I don't know enough about the operation of OBS to advise intelligently.
Do we need to start fundraising for more disk drives?? I'm curious to hear more informed opinions.
-Archie
I would definitely chip in for more opensuse repo lifetime, and for more manpower to uphold a higher standard in the opensuse product wrt stability of interface , predictability, backward compatibility, general polish "if there's a button, it works".
The usual response is "you want SLE". No, I do not want a cul-de-sac proprietary product environment that is somewhat like opensuse but different enough that packages and documentation and procedures etc for opensuse do not always apply to sle NOR vice versa.
If I spend time working on a package, or documenting a procedure, and I'm giving my time away, then I want the result to be applicable to everyone else for free as I intended instead of some subset of people that pay Novell being the only ones that benefit. If I wanted that, I'd have done the work for pay and just my own customers would benefit.
And when I look for help or clues from others experiences, I want to have a large pool of data to work from, not just the people who for some reason pay for SLE.
"It's a free thing, you have no right to expectations" is a crap argument. Why bother working on a thing at all if you and the other people working on it do not mostly want it to be excellent?
"X is willing to do the work so X gets to say how it goes." is also a crap argument. I'm "willing to do the work" to fix the text mode server model so that it has no branding or graphics anywhere in it, no splashy or gfxboot, unhacked upstream versions of grub & syslinux, no kdm, etc, but it ain't happening. And anybody can be willing to do the work for all manner of horrible ideas (systemd), but that shouldn't be enough of a reason to allow it to happen.
There are just a lot of problems with the reponses to various complaints that I and others have raised in general. It's just starting to feel like the main opensuse contributors are no longer interested in making a system that's actually useful for others, instead mostly interested in amusing themselves.
I haven't tracked other distros development closely so I don't know, it may be the same everywhere and maybe opensuse is no worse than any other in this respect. It may just be a generational thing.
But back on topic, I'd pay for more repo lifetime.
Also svn/git-like revision histories of spec files. Like what the wiki does. So you don't have to lose the various optimal points that are reached and then lost along the way right now, where a newer package might be possible to build on some older target, and it existed for a while, but now the knowledge of that is lost because the current version of that package isn't buildable on that old target, and the spec and src.rpm from that time no longer exist, maybe the whole repo no longer exists ala kotd, server:monitoring, etc, only the current ones and the much older ones that shipped with that older target and nothing in between.
The point is this: SUSE is the one who pays for openSUSE's lifetime. As in, SUSE pays the people working on security updates and fixes. SUSE pays the server space and processing power. We are committed to pay for keeping 2 openSUSE versions maintained and alive with a few months bonus. We're not going to pay for more as it is expensive and doing so would cut in our income - we're not exactly trying to kill our own company and land all our engineers on the street. All that seems to me to be very much a community thing: a community member (SUSE) does work. When SUSE stops doing that work and nobody takes over, well, it stops. If someone wants to take over (like Wolfgang did) or pay to keep it alive: awesome. If you are willing to pay to keep openSUSE 11.3 alive for say 2 more years I'd be happy to try and get you a quote for support. If you think it's stupid to pay for such a service and you don't want to do the work, well, what do you expect? SUSE employees need to eat and donations won't pay for that. Heck, selling the openSUSE Box makes so little money we don't even bother anymore... I see nothing that warrants the anger you and Archie are displaying, sorry. About the "but why RHEL and not openSUSE 11.3" - simple, we keep versions which are actively maintained. RHEL is, openSUSE 11.3 is not.