Again: EOL Policy for Fedora Extras

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2006 19:30:14 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> We still have no defined EOL Policy for Fedora Extras -- there were some
> ideas and concepts floating around, but no real policy came out of it so
> far. I'd really like to get this solved somehow soon. That's why I'm
> writing this mail. 

Long mail, short story: Do we agree on common goals with regard to FE?
I'm not sure we do. Instead of discussing EOL policy bottom-up for FE3,
how about we discuss in general _what_ we at Fedora Extras _try_ to offer?

> mailinglist-archives:
> 
> 
> - Now that FC3 was transfered to Legacy we need some kind of policy for
> FE3, too -- users want to know if FE3 is still completely supported. 

Reason: package maintainers often move on to the current if not latest
release of FC and don't run an older FC anymore. So they don't do any
run-time evaluation of upgrades/updates anymore. Unless they are the "if
it builds, push it" type of packagers, they don't release any upgrades
which they don't use regularly themselves. Further, the older a release of
FC gets, the more difficult security related version upgrades become, if
they require upgraded dependencies. This also leads to coordination
and compatibility requirements between FE and Fedora Legacy.

> - We cannot offer an old FE which is out-of-date or possible insecure at
> least partially.

Which means, there's no need to shut down a repo, but the project ought to
announce the "updates support level users can expect" compared with Extras
for the current release of FC.
 
> - It's Extras. It's unsupported by nature.

That's brain-fart type of comment. Suitable for flame-wars, not for
serious attempts at discussing this issue. Hopefully we all know what kind
of "support" Fedora Extras is about.

> - How many fire and forget packages are sitting in Extras?

Same here. :( Let's shut down the whole show just because of a few black
sheep.

> And some concrete plans:

> - shove FE3 into a Maintenance state for now -- no new packages, no big
> updates but still updates in case of security problems

What is "concrete" about this suggestion? It's just another proposal
which doesn't suggest _who_ performs the updates. Assume that some
packagers will _refuse_ releasing updates for a legacy FC.
 
> - we create an extras legacy team that takes over FE3 when FC3 is
> transfered to legacy 

+1  This is the only realistic suggestion. No community developer
interest, no show.