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
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