Legacy in Build Roots

Toshio Kuratomi toshio at tiki-lounge.com
Sat Aug 5 00:50:03 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 00:50 +0200, Christian Iseli wrote:

> Enabling legacy packages in the buildroot was discussed at the last
> FESCo meeting.  There was some disagreement, but I think the general
> feeling went along the following lines:
> 
> a. the FL team takes over maintainership of FC when the FC team EOLs
> it.  Given that FL is a component of the Fedora project, I see no
> reason not to trust them and their better judgement to maintain those
> packages
> 
> b. FL is mainly about security fixes
> 
> c. there is no such thing as Extras Legacy, and likely won't be in the
> foreseeable future
> 
> d. the impression is that most users keeping old Fedora releases
> running subscribe to FL
> 
> Taking a-d into account, I see a reasonable case to take
> advantage of FL security fixes for those maintainers still interested
> in maintaining packages for old FE releases.  It's far from perfect,
> but I think it's better than not using FL.
> 
> The main problems I see:
>  - users need to subscribe to FL.  IMHO, the proper solution is to add
> FL packages to the FC updates like would seem natural.  But that's not
> FESCo's call.  FAB maybe ?
And Fedora Legacy....

>  - some FE maintainers don't want to maintain old releases.  IMHO,
> co-maintainership should help in that case.  Or maybe the security SIG,
> but they probably have enough on their plate already.

If a Fedora Legacy update ends up breaking FE packages, who is going to
fix it?  Ideally it needs to be someone that wants to fix it.  Right now
there are a large number of groups which do not want to fix it and a
handful of individuals who do.  Having those individuals "co-maintain"
the packages needing Legacy rebuilds is inefficient.  What we need is to
organize those individuals into a group that can respond to Legacy
issues.

There has been a strong contingent against having an FE-Legacy group
that mirrors FC-Legacy.  The argument seems to be that an FE-Legacy
group encourages maintainers to give up maintenance of older releases
and assume that the FE-Legacy group will pick up the pieces.  The
counter arguments are that FC hands off to FL so it is 1) this example
which prompts maintainers to expect to stop maintaining at that point
and 2) unfair to require volunteer FE packagers to do more work than
paid FC packagers.  As long as there is a split between Fedora Core and
Fedora Legacy there is a precedent for FE packagers to only maintain for
the current releases.

I think we need to look at long term and short term plans.  Long term we
might want to get rid of a separate Fedora Legacy -- instead maintainers
of both Core and Extras packages (and their teams of co-maintainers)
will continue to provide security and major bugfixes to the Legacy
releases.  A possible short term solution is to start a Legacy SIG which
fixes things that break in Legacy FE releases.

-Toshio
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