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

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7 February 2012 15:57, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> On 02/01/2012 11:52 AM, Adam Miller wrote:
>> just that we continue along with
>> challenges we face today
>
> 'Just' is always tricky in these situations.
>
> I've been chatting with the Bugzilla packager on Bugzilla ('sup dog)
> about this, and I think it's worth talking about policy.
>
> EPEL6 currently ships Bugzilla 3.4, a branch that's about to become
> abandoned upstream.  Xavier has been doing backports of security fixes
> to 3.2 (EPEL5) and could conceivably do this for 3.4 for a while, but
> doing this for the next 8 years is a tall order.
>
> The problem with the backports approach is that backporting difficulty
> doesn't scale linearly.  Backporting a patch at year 1 is probably
> pretty easy - at year 10 it could be a major project.
>
> I think it's possible that the current EPEL policy may have been
> flirting with the edge of what is possible with volunteers and adding a
> significant time extension to that could push it over.  Redhat has
> decided that it will pay its employees to make this happen for their
> [smaller] set of packages.  I don't think it necessarily follows that
> this is the right decision for EPEL.
>
> In the case of Bugzilla, EPEL policy, as I understand it, precludes the
> rebasing of 3.4 to 3.6, 4.0, or 4.2 branches because upgrade
> compatibility isn't trivially guaranteed.  The standard case would be
> satisfied by running the checksetup.pl script on upgrade, but certain
> extensions and customizations might cause that to fail.
>
> Xavier has entertained the idea of having a bugzilla36, bugzilla40, or
> bugzilla42 package for those seeking features, but that raises questions
> of usability 'yum install bugzilla??' and perhaps eventual abandonment
> of the 3.4 'bugzilla' package.
>

What I am doing with mediawiki is similar... and when mediawiki118
gets through a review process, 114,115 and 116 will be put in the
"goodbye" pile. Dealing with

yum install mediawiki

is a problem but I have come to the conclusion that having people at
least doing a "yum list mediawiki*" to help show what is available is
what I am aiming for.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd