On Thu, 2015-08-06 at 10:26 +0200, Bjoern Voigt wrote:
You are right. But SLES comes every 2-5 years, e.g. SLES 11 2009 and SLES 12 2014. You understand that's a big change for users who come from 3 releases a year to Leap with a SLES base and the base changes every 2-5 years.
You have to compare what openSUSE did, not what SuSE Linux did. openSUSE has been trying to keep up an 8 month cycle, more or less successful, and then basically formally agreed that a 12 month cycle is more realistically. SLE 11 to SLE12 took a long time, but SLE12 to SLE12SP1 is much shorter (~ one year), same is expected for SLE12SP2. And the SLE12 Service Packs are not just meant to be collection of patches, but are actually allowed to bring new versions as well... and every new Leap version will be based on the latest service pack. So the 5 year scenario you prsent there is painting a wrong picture. And besides that, Leap is not FORCED to use SLE packages: there is a lot of stuff already coming from Tumbleweed into Leap 42.1, there is no reason to believe that Leap 42.2 (that will be based on SLE12SP2) will not do the same for stuff that is considered 'out of date, but interesting/important enough to be updated'. you see, the 5 year cycle you mention bears no importance at all
But keep in mind the SuSE Linux at the time was developed entirely different compared to openSUSE now - most notably: it was done behind closed doors without you having any word in it.
I know. In these times we wrote e-mails to the package maintainers, if we found a problem. Bugzilla, build service, additional repositories etc. came later.
But we also had to pay for the SuSE boxes and only some users had a fast Internet connection and were capable to download SuSE. Today, probably the SLES users contribute most to sales. That's why, there interests are more important!?
the SLE customers pay for a service and the fact that they are not
supposed to WORK on creating the distribution.
openSUSE (the distribution) is a community product: if the community is
not working on it, there won't be a product. Don't think that one
single sponsor (SUSE in this case) is going to maintain all of it.
--
Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger