Feature proposal: Extended Life Cycle Support

Jeroen van Meeuwen kanarip at kanarip.com
Mon Jul 6 18:20:50 UTC 2009


On Mon, 6 Jul 2009 10:57:34 -0600, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:58:52 +0200
> Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip at kanarip.com> wrote:
> 
>> I wanted to draw your attention to a feature I've proposed for Fedora 
>> 12, mysteriously called Extended Life Cycle.
>> 
>> You can find more details at 
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Extended_Life_Cycle
>> 
>> Kind regards,
> 
> Some general comments: 
> 
> - Have you talked with the last folks that attempted this? 
> 
>
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-February/msg00030.html
> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc7dcczk_2fxtsctdq&hl=en
> 
> - The issue I have with this plan (and the others very like it) is that
>   if you say "we will just do updates for the things we have people
>   willing to do updates" it means the entire end of life distro is not
>   covered and the likelyhood of an outstanding security issue is quite
>   high. There is a chicken and egg issue here where unless there is
>   enough coverage we shouldn't do it, but we can't find out if there is
>   enough coverage without doing it. Doing it in such a way that it
>   fails just gives everyone a bad name and feeling, IMHO.
> 

This "issue" depends on an "if", and is thus invalid. Maybe what you wanted
to say/ask is along the lines of:

"Are you planning on only providing updates for the packages you have
maintainers for?". In that case;

The question doesn't make any sense -given that the Feature page does not
say "only a selection of packages". To put it in understandable English: We
are not going to selectively supply updates for a limited number of
packages, it's either all or nothing.

> - An indeterminate time is also bad IMHO. How can these corporations
>   plan if they don't know how much time you are adding here?
> 

6 months is our initial life cycle extension, as the page says.

I feel like everyone missed that.

Who am I to set the extended life cycle when various people participate...?
I'm not in control! Would the period of time to extend the life cycle with
not be the first agenda item at a meeting of peers interested and/or
participating? I made one suggestion to start out with, 6 months, put it on
the Feature page and no-one reads it. Frankly those 6 months are not set in
stone -it's just a proposal for the bunch of people interested and a
guideline for others -including those deciding on whether this feature is
in or out. Regrettably, some of these people feel like they *are* in
control, rather then providing the governance they should. Different
subject though.

> - Have you considered leveraging the 'critical path' proposal? Try and
>   up front get enough folks to cover all the critical path packages and
>   expand from there?
> 

Yes I have. It is not applicable to the scenario I'm after, though in the
long term would help the greater Fedora community; including potential
users of what could be an extended life cycle.

> - How many people are on board with this? Do you have guidelines for
>   what will be updated or not? what packages? Version updates ok? Or
>   only security fixes? 
> 

This is a lot of questions for one bullet point. I lost you half-way
through. What's the actual question here?

Reading it on a question-mark per question-mark basis though, I think the
feature page answers half of the half-posed questions. Anyway:

- a bunch
- everything that needs to be updated to ensure prolonged security fixes'
availability for any given Fedora release
- only security fixes
- no guarantee for stable API/ABI
- no guarantee for binary compatibility throughout the life cycle

> - Are there any Corporations that specifically asked for this? Would
>   they be willing to provide any resources to the effort?
> 

The demand is there..., the offerings... not so much. Maybe there's a trick
to get sponsoring for something that does not and may not exist yet because
approval is pending, that I don't know about. Care to share?

-- Jeroen




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list