I wanted to post some comments to this list from someone who is part of producing the full releases and legacy on them. Comments below. -Chris >When will people understand that a community project needs more than a >"one man gang" who just tries to push it forward? Warren Togami's problem >is, he can make a project look as if it is alive and happy when in fact it >is in serious lack of contributors. Well, at fedora.us, for instance, it >is not a problem if some 50+ packages for educational programming >languages [and other stuff with a very special target group] seem to stay >in the queue forever. But with Fedora Legacy, the project should have >tried to be ready 1-2 months ago already and know exactly how to get an >update published. E.g. the fedora.us build system is used and won't be >happy about missing build dependencies (Red Hat's build system is >different). Instead, much time has been spent on discussing poor press >releases or web site layout stuff. However, if you check the fedora legacy >list, a few people are trying to deal with the recent flood of security >issues. But the general tendency is, if no one shows interest in a >particular package and a bit of work on it, there won't be updates for >it. A recent suggestion has been to track such packages in bugzilla as >"unmaintained". > >As a side-note, there's also the risk that as soon as someone offers a fix >for a package at some place without submitting it as an official Fedora >Legacy update, subscribers of fedora-legacy-list might find that >satisfactory and no one might do the additional work of getting the >package approved and published. I think that this shows that producing and supporting a Linux distribution is not a simple project on its own for a small number of non-paid people. The OSs are pre-existing of course os that part is done. Many people I've seen in IRC and/or email lists mention that they would volunteer to work on a legacy support project for EOL releases, however I haven't personally seen very many people actually step forward to do real work, or contribute to the necessary infrastructural and organizational efforts that would be required in order for such a Fedora Legacy project to truely be successful. Unpaid volunteers are hard to come by. I cerainly wish any Fedora Legacy project, and its members much success in trying to support EOL products, but it is a huge undertaking, and will require not one or two, but a great number of dedicated volunteers putting in a large number of man hours of work to put together all of the infrastructure and organizational bits, and to do the work of backporting or creating fixes for legacy rpms and building and testing them on all platforms that the project wishes to support. It's not a small task any way you look at it. To get started, the organizational bits need to be in place first, and some mechanism for quality control needs to be developed and manned. Then people need to volunteer for specific packages, and be willing to also be assigned to do something. That's the only way I can see such a huge effort succeeding, and that's enough work right there just to support a single OS release alone, rather than all EOL products. Security bugs are the biggest problem, as they hit you when you least expect it, and have tonnes of existing work on your plate, be it job, school, other projects, etc. yet you need to drop what you're doing, and fix some possibly obscure complex security issue of which you may have a patch fed to you, or may need to debug and figure it out yourself, and make sure you're not breaking anything while you're trying to whip up the fixes quickly and get them tested (by someone else ALWAYS). So, it is a very huge project to undertake for anyone at all IMHO. Since it's all volunteer work, and all volunteer work has non-monetary motivators by definition, perhaps that is a good place to start looking to build the project. What are the motivations for someone to join and/or contribute? Come up with some realistic motivations, and post them to the site, and advertise getting involved. Get the infrastructure together, and have a leader who has the time to spare to be the leader. That's the best advice I can try to provide for now anyway. I'll do my part by keeping XFree86 4.3.0 building on RHL 8.0 and newer, and 4.1.0 building on 7.[12]. 4.2.x is free for grabs to anyone who wants it though. ;o) Take care, TTYL P.S. Feel free to forward between mailing lists if you think others may benefit from my words above to aide the Fedora Legacy project. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat "There is a lot of speculation and I guess there is going to continue to be a lot of speculation until the speculation ends." - George W. Bush on October 18, 1998
