Legacy in Build Roots

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le vendredi 04 août 2006 à 17:50 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi a écrit :

> 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 both you and the Legacy people misunderstand the meaning of the
split for packagers. It's not "since there is a split I'll only maintain
current releases" but "I'll only maintain current releases and since
there is a split I'll do so till the legacy handover".

Without the split I for example would not have been maintaining my
packages forever but would have stopped maintenance much sooner (only
doing rawhide + current).

The split is not a "stop there" but "do at least so much"

> 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.

The current situation has nice commitment limits (granted legacy should
move closer to extras but that's a legacy not extras problem). I'll
personally oppose at my low maintainer level lifting them.

However should they be lifted I think you totally misunderstand what the
effect will be. People committed to maintaining every Fedora release
under the Sun will continue to do so. Other people (because more
releases is more work, which sucks) will probably shift their
commitment, either doing less updates to address more releases or less
updated releases than now. Either way you look at it Extras quality will
go down since maintainers won't be focused on the same releases anymore.

In a volunteer project rules do not affect the amount of work people do.
They only affect how the volunteers whose to allocate it. Spreading the
available work budget over more releases will only benefit Legacy. The
Legacy people should remember however a smaller Extras will mean less
Fedora users and less Legacy users.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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