State of 7.2/8.0 in Fedora Legacy

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net>:

> With the recent addition of Red Hat Linux 9, and the nearing end of life
> of Fedora Core 1, it's becoming apparent that the Fedora Legacy project
> lacks the man power to properly support all these releases.

With the EOL of RHL 9, and nearing EOL of FC1, we should expect to pick
up more man power.  But it may still not be aimed at the needed areas,
so it may not help much with the question at hand.

> After trolling through bugzilla last night, it was quickly apparent that
> many of the packages in limbo were waiting on RHL 7.2/8.0 builds/QA.

Mostly QA IMHO.

> I've made noise before about dropping 7.2/8.0 and there has always been
> people making noise that they didn't want to see it dropped.

Of course I don't want to see it dropped.  But that doesn't mean it shouldn't
be dropped.  Just because it is useful to 10% of the community doesn't mean
it should hold up the other 90% of the community.  But as part of the 10%
of course I don't want to see it dropped.  That doesn't mean I would fight
to stop it, as I can see the reality of the situation.

> However I
> have not seen much (if any) community support for these releases.  For
> these reasons I am more inclined than ever to drop these releases.

I understand that, in particular for RH 8.0.  7.2 support is easier than
8.0 support, so I think they may need to be discussed seperately.

> For the most part, RHL 7.3 packages (and RHEL2.1 packages) can be
> rebuilt to run on 7.2, and RHL9 (RHEL3) packages can be rebuilt to run
> on 8.0.  However without proper testing and engineering by the Fedora
> Legacy community it would be irresponsible for us to just do these
> simple steps.

Yes, we at least need a large amount of QA testing of the rebuilds or
it would indeed be irresponsible to do so (since the goals are security
and stability).

> As we move forward, streamlining updates is absolutely necessary.  In
> order to streamline, the bottlenecks need to be addressed, and today
> these road blocks (aside from me and my personal time management
> issues) are RHL 7.2 and RHL 8.0.

Agreed, though I'm not sure if we need to address them now, or later.  But
they do need to be addressed as we move forward.

> So again, I broach the subject of removing these releases from official
> Fedora Legacy supported releases.  We will still be supporting the
> overwhelming majority of users and it is the best use of the limited
> resources of the Fedora Legacy project.

I would be sad to see RH 8.0 dropped, but I understand why you want to do
so, and I would accept such a decision by the FL community.  Truth is I
only have 1 RH 8.0 server, so it isn't a real big deal to me.  (I do have
a handful of RH 8.0 laptops/desktops, but I can upgrade them to 9 without
any problem, so that isn't even a consideration).  I'd have a hard time
telling FL to support my single RH 8.0 server, which I could easily do
myself based on the 7.3 and 9 updates being provided.

> Please provide your (relevant) feedback.  Thanks.

I'll let others address the 7.2 issues.  I think they really differ from
the 8.0 issues in many ways.  But given the limited release of 8.0, and
the lack of QA testers for it, I'd have to say I'm okay with it being
dropped.

I'd consider it a failure of the community to support FL, and not a failure
of the FL core team/community which does exist, if this came to pass.

> - --
> Jesse Keating RHCE      (http://geek.j2solutions.net)
> Fedora Legacy Team      (http://www.fedoralegacy.org)
> GPG Public Key
> (http://geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)

--
Eric Rostetter