Long-term package versions (RHEL 5+ extended to 10 years until EOL)

[Xavier Bachelot]

On 02/09/2012 04:00 AM, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On 02/08/2012 09:46 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>> * If you can't do a seemless upgrade, you move on to parallel installs
>>    like we are doing with mediawiki. Announce and try and get people to
>>    realize the flow and that they need to upgrade.
>
> I like the general outline, though the 'announce' part might be a bit
> tricky.  The biggest risk would be that people think they're getting
> updates to their core package when they're not.
>
I like that too, and think it would be nice to have such a comprehensive 
list somewhere in the wiki. I also fear that the announce mails might 
miss their target and something involving yum would seem better to me. 
See below.

> Several ideas that involve writing code came to mind, but the easiest
> might be to do one more release of the base package and drop a cron.d
> file in that tells root every day that he's running an maintained
> package.  It won't get everybody but most conscientious admins watch
> their cron output (and could easily turn it off if they decide to stay
> with the base package).  EPEL could decide on a standard template to use.
>
> Perhaps there's a better way to get word out to users?
>
Rather than a cron mail that could easily get lost, just like the 
announce mails, would there be any way to maintain a list of 
discontinued packages in the repo or repodata and have a yum plugin 
check against this list. I have no idea if it is at all possible to do 
that, I don't know what yum plugins are able to do or not, and how 
convenient/feasible it would do have such a list in the repo or repodatas.

Regards,
Xavier