After having slept on it, for me it's time to unsubscribe and discontinue any Fedora Legacy activities. Hence I wave "Good bye!" to the few people involved so far. If I were enough of a geek and found myself interesting enough to run my own blog, I would bitch about it in there. But I'm not. And so I post a few impressions here. It just doesn't work, when even trivial fixes or patches ripped off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux errata don't receive proper attention and the update packages sit in the queue for months without anyone posting clearsigned reviews or approvals, respectively. Future fixes won't be as easy as taking patches from RHEL without modification and applying them to Red Hat Linux 7.3. It may be necessary to do real backporting and prepare and test upgrades as a last resort. No, it's not that updates are prioritized and more important updates occupy all available resources. It's not hardware and server maintenance induced delays either, because the bugzilla system is available and the packages can be prepared meanwhile independently of mirror/server logistics. It's that the Fedora Legacy community has not decided on publish criteria and minimal formalism on how to review and approve packages (in particular the good bits of the fedora.us policies and guidelines). Therefore, neither packagers or reviewers know what exactly is required to get a package published _in time_. It's not even known how to get a package into "updates-testing" and how long it will be kept in there. Additionally, non-existing updates for less popular distributions (e.g. rh80) hold up reviewed and approved updates for popular distributions, e.g. rh73. A developer, who looks into security advisories and patches today, doesn't want to repeat the same work 2-3 months later -- when finally it's decided the time has come to push out another update which has been neglected for several weeks or when the next weakness must be dealt with and the fix for the previous one has not been approved yet. Developers and reviewers want to finish something and move on. The early support for rh73 has been an opportunity to practice doing legacy updates, in particular with official patches from RHEL which make that a lot easier. This chance has not been taken. So long, Michael
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