Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
At 03:32 PM 10/24/2006, Jesse Keating wrote: On Tuesday 24 October 2006 18:21, Mike McCarty wrote: These are interesting stats, and indicate that Linux may now be crossing the gap. I belive most offices are still firmly MS product houses, and a move to Linux would not even be considered. I know that every time I see a request for a resume, the format requested is MS Word. Just because it's MSWord doesn't mean it is Windows... and even OpenOffice can export as Word native... so if someone wants Word format, Linux can deliver, as is PDF... It's funny that if you create a text file, and put that MS specific .DOC extension, Word can read it just fine... it has converters to do that, and most corporate installs have it already in place. Try it, you'll see... Use on the desktop should not be tied to use in the server room. You'll find a MUCH higher usage of linux in the server room. However since the majority of the desktops are Windows, MS Word gets used a lot. A really open cross platform format should be used, such as PDF, but that's not a here nor there question. Linux is great in the server room/network closet. Linux runs every one of my servers on my home LAN, and I've been an advocate of Linux in the enterprise space to supplement/replace other platforms for servers. We can do it faster/better/cheaper (pick any three) in this arena... On the desktop, it's another story... Sorry if I'm getting a tad bit into advocacy... The KDE/Gnome folks have made excellent progress when you compare it to the shell or to CDE/OpenWindows... and it's a long way from NextStep (although OpenStep is working hard to resolve that vector). The Linux Desktop - It's similar to where MacOS was in the early days of System6, and Windows 3.1 days... and those days weren't bad. The Windows Program Manager/File Manager was a good shell to launch modal applications, and Mac's Finder in System6 isn't much different as compared to what Gnome is using. MacOS6 plus MultiFinder Win's OLE API's and Mac's Publish/Subscribe model at the system level is not really prevalent on the Linux desktop as of yet, however XMPP is a good step forward, if the desktop and apps folks buy into it... There's a long way to go before Linux can really challenge WindowsXP and OSX on the desktop... challenge is good, it motivates folks, and that may be the bridge to resolving the main Linux desktop problem, which is the KDE/Gnome issue. Until this is resolved, Linux will remain in the server room, where it is very suited, and will suffer on the desktop. Just my $0.02 worth... Tim -- Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. -Buddha -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.408 / Virus Database: 268.13.11/493 - Release Date: 10/23/2006 -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Tuesday 24 October 2006 10:19, Mike McCarty wrote: Gene Heskett wrote: [snip] Maybe the question we should be asking is: Can we do this? We don't have the number of people that Debian Security has on supporting old releases.. and because we have fallen so far behind with everything.. can we dig ourselves out.. or do we need to completely reboot the whole thing (new people, new goals, new name) with the new people really knowing that A) we arent going to get much help from 3rd party vendors B) we arent going to get much help from the community I'd comment that for this fedora user at least, the security etc stuffs should be extended at least to the point where we each of us, has a system, old though it may be in FC years, that works and does everything WE want it to do. Hi, Gene. I haven't been around here for a while. Nice to see something from you. That's my situation, too. But I don't think that the FC project is really set up for that. I use FC2, and when I finally bite the bullet and feel it imperative to upgrade it won't be to FCx. That isn't what FC is about, it seems. For the reason you give, it doesn't really suit my needs. Throwing us to the wolves doesn't make me want to format and update at anywhere near the release cycle for FC. My email archive alone goes back into 1998 here. Yes, there are backups, and I do them rather religiously Umm, FC didn't exist in 1998. Of course not, but RH5 did. Anyway, FC is really for tinkerers, not for people who want a distro that just works. I installed it because I was asked to do so by a company which hired me for a contract. For my *own* needs, Debian would have been better. Much slower release cycle. Fewer defects. But I'm not about to do this every 6 months as planned by the FC people, I Well, that's what FC *is*. I have several friends who have started using Linux over the last few years, and we are all going through culture shock at what is called QA in the Linux World. FC, even in Linux terms, is a use at your own risk kind of distro. Not that care isn't taken, but stuff is gonna break when a new release comes out. So we've noticed, and its the really blatant breakage that irks us the most, like FC4's x crashing on probably half the boxes at the initial reboot. With no clues of course because the only way to get to the logs was to reboot from the cd in single mode. And not being fam with the mount tree, the logs are hard to find. But, that FC4 fiaso that had many of us threatening to burn someone at the stake did help in that it brought the attention of TPTB that additional checking and bodies needed to be assigned to the FC releases, and that additional effort can certainly be seen in the overall quality of the FC5 release. Unforch, now I'm reading between the lines and coming to the conclusion that fedora is again being body starved. We'll see in a couple of days I guess. If you don't want installing the OS to be a hobby, perhaps you should consider a different distro. I know I am. Yup, I have one kubuntu box now running emc2-head, and there may be a kubuntu install on this box in another few weeks. Although, after the initial fixups of FC5 on my lappy, its all working pretty well, so the coin with kubuntu 6.10 on one side, and FC6 on the other, is still up in the air. Kubuntu's main problem is the cups install is about half, like one testical didn't come down, so there's a lot of wheels to reinvent there before cups does its thing with networked printers. I made it work by copying stuff off other working systems, thank $favorite-deity for samba someone telling me howto make a real root account on a kubuntu box... Mike -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Tuesday 24 October 2006 10:23, Mike McCarty wrote: Matthew Miller wrote: [snip] Using the Chasm marketing model [*], without Legacy, Fedora is only a viable solution for Early Adopters and of dubious value to the second Pragmatist group. However, Fedora has been enough of a success that many Pragmatists are indeed using Fedora. I'm not familiar with that, but I'll look into it. I agree with your statement. I couldn't say it any better either. This results in large numbers of FC2, FC3, FC4 machines in production beyond their supported lifetime. Pragmatists, by their nature, don't wanna be upgrading all the time. Without Legacy, they're best served by CentOS and kin. That's fine, but it's a loss for Fedora, as they're then less likely to feed back into Extras, etc. And it's also a problem because it results in large numbers of potentially vulnerable machines in the wild. You have struck a very large nail upon the head with perfect orthogonality. I'm using FC2 here. Ditto, albeit with lots of stuff installed from tarballs because so much of FC2 was considerably more broken. IMO to release that without any kde testing should have been a no-no. As it was, just waving the mouse over a printing function in a kde menu brought the box down. Thats NOT good PR for fedora. Fedora people repeatedly state that the distribution is great for users beyond the tech-enthusiast Earlier Adopters. But without Legacy, it's really not true. Indeed. This is a statement which I have made on several occasions, only to be hooted down. Well, in my case I picked a distro that spoke english, then fixed what needed to be fixed. That wasn't as easy as it should have been when one can't stand the gnome's constant nagging about being root, dammit its my machine, why the heck should I put another million miles on my mouse getting rid of nag windows cause I'm root! That meant that cups, gimp, imagemajik, kino, qt and kde all got installed outside the rpm box from tarballs that FC2 would never backport even though what they had was broken. Now kino has died due to kernel changes (currently running 2.6.19-rc3), so the next vcd I make will be on my lappies teeny little 60GB partition for linux. Or on this box after I put FC6||kubuntu on it. Would the world be worse off if fedora died? Obviously yes, even for the pragmatists. We all bet on our favorite horse you know. Mike -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On 10/24/06, Mike McCarty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Stephen John Smoogen wrote: On 10/20/06, Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:36:15AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and temporary schedule changes that have become permanent. Yes. In order to survive the project needs some real support from Red Hat. (Or some other large company who wants to do Red Hat a favor, but that seems even less likely.) Using the Chasm marketing model [*], without Legacy, Fedora is only a viable solution for Early Adopters and of dubious value to the second Pragmatist group. However, Fedora has been enough of a success that many Pragmatists are indeed using Fedora. I would argue that the pragmatists had been using it out of a trust model. They had used Red Hat Linux when it has crossed the chasm, and I don't believe that Linux in general has crossed the chasm yet. I think it's *all* still in the early adopters stage. But within the Linux community (oxymoron) FC is the early adopters of the early adopters. That would put you in the conservative column then. So far at the 3 10,000+ person companies I have worked at for the last 5 years, we have replaced 90% of our Solaris, AIX, mainframes etc with Linux. From what I have been helping with at other sites this has been the trend in the last 4 years. One site a friend works at just bought 5000 sun boxes. Although they each have a Solaris license, none of them will be using Solaris.. its just that the AMD hardware was considered better to run the clusters on. [snip] 2) I use Fedora to alpha/beta test for the next/current Red Hat Enterprise. How come when I state that FC is beta test, I get dog-piled, but you don't? Because I said I used Fedora as a beta test.. not that Fedora is a beta test. The two are not equal statements. Red Hat may not use it as such, but I as a consumer do. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Tuesday 24 October 2006 18:21, Mike McCarty wrote: These are interesting stats, and indicate that Linux may now be crossing the gap. I belive most offices are still firmly MS product houses, and a move to Linux would not even be considered. I know that every time I see a request for a resume, the format requested is MS Word. Use on the desktop should not be tied to use in the server room. You'll find a MUCH higher usage of linux in the server room. However since the majority of the desktops are Windows, MS Word gets used a lot. A really open cross platform format should be used, such as PDF, but that's not a here nor there question. -- Jesse Keating RHCE (geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) pgproA3J5P4VO.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Jesse Keating wrote: On Thursday 19 October 2006 11:44, Matthew Miller wrote: I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. I can't speak for others, but going into Fedora Core, I knew what the limitations were, and I adjusted my expectations accordingly. I think what much it is boils down is to what is Fedora? It's a distro that is close to the tip of development on GNU/Linux, close enough to be cutting edge, but not so close to the tip to be useless. I knew this going in, and Fedora has done well for what I expected it to do. It's fairly stable, has up to date items for most of the things that I'm interested in for development, and let's me explore some of the items that are next step for RHEL... The realistic expectation is that SQA has been done for core and updates, along with extras... and that Fedora is not forever... If a longer life-cycle is desired, move over to RHEL/Clones... you'll be happier for it. Here is what I think can happen. A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. Agreed, might get some flak here from others, but is Fedora Legacy the right place for supporting RHL? B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. Again, agreed... can prolong things to some extent... C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. For non-critical patches, this is more than fair... Somewhere in there convince Luke Macken to do the work to get a Fedora Update tool available for use externally that does the boring stuff like generate the email with the checksums and with the subpackage list and all that boring stuff. It could even handle moving the bug to 'MODIFIED' when it goes in updates-testing, and finally to CLOSED when it goes to release. Then it would be easier to get people to contribute, as they'd just be doing things like checking out a package module, copying a patch from somewhere, commit, build. That would help a lot. Somebody more senior in the project would fiddle with the tool to prepare the update, and do the sign+push. I honestly think that doing these things is the only way that Legacy will survive. What would be nice, in a perfect world, is that we change things... Dev/Stable/Maint... add one more level... Maint would be [security] updates only for -2 from current, Stable would be the previous release, and Dev would be the current release... on the eve of FC6 release (hopefully)... Dev - FC6 Stable - FC5 Maint - FC4 Obsolete - FC3 and earlier... And then increment once the next Development snapshot is formally released... Keeping that in mind, this reduces the load to Legacy, as Legacy can work through the maintainance of non-core/non-security updates, and this prolongs the Legacy releases... My biggest grip right now with moving from one snapshot to the next (i.e. from FC3 - FC4 or FC4- FC5) is that upgrading is not very clean. Sorry if this is a bit late... been busy in the real-world, but this is something that we can fix... both for supporting older releases as well as making the migration less painful... Tim -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Eric Rostetter wrote: Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: And for a while Pekka was posting a list of all the work needed items. Was that not usable? I don't remember the discussion of a mailing list for bugs, Yes, it was, but as I said, I've not seen one for a while... Me not having sent the reminder doesn't mean that the bug list hasn't been updated. It has -- at least semi-regularly (once 1-2 days). I didn't bother because clearly the project failed to function some time ago and there didn't seem to be a point. -- Pekka Savola You each name yourselves king, yet the Netcore Oykingdom bleeds. Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Pekka Savola [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Me not having sent the reminder doesn't mean that the bug list hasn't been updated. It has -- at least semi-regularly (once 1-2 days). Yep, but my point was that people like me, and I've often said on this list I'm basically lazy, want a push rather than pull system. I didn't bother because clearly the project failed to function some time ago and there didn't seem to be a point. I'm not disagreeing. Just answering Jesse's question to me. I do appreciate that you tried for so long to make a difference by maintaining the list and sending it to the list. At least you took and active role and tried to make things better. More than I can really give myself credit for really. You've been a great help to the project, at least IMHO. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I know that personally I haven't been able to contribute the amount of time I'd like to make this succeed. But I have a full-time job and a young child, and am mildly active in umpteen other projects. Legacy support is hard work, and really needs two or three full-time workers to be a success. It's tempting to blame the lack of volunteers, but this sort of project works best if there's a solid base. I can't disagree with that. I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. I think it is good for everyone. RHEL and its clones have a different mission than Fedora, and people should use the one that fits their needs. The two fill different needs. Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. It is exactly what it is supposed to be. Yes, that is only part of the mission, the other major part being a test-bed for RHEL. The mission also includes helping developers, providing consistency of interfaces, and making the Fedora experience better for the end user. But the whole point of Fedora is to be leading/cutting edge, and you can't be leading edge with a long lifetime. Fedora Legacy is really only there to allow for a more flexible upgrade schedule for the users, not to extend the lifetime any real length of time. That is, maybe a particular site can only upgrade 2 times per year, and those times don't match with the Fedora Project release schedule. Fedora Legacy allows them to keep running the previous version in a _secure_ manor until their update window comes along. That's really all Fedora Legacy is for, as concerns Fedora Core (not Red Hat Linux, which is a slightly different issue). Now, maybe we've dropped the ball (on delivering the secure part of the promise). I won't argue that. Nor can I say exactly why the ball might have been dropped, or how best to pick it back up. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On 10/20/06, Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matthew Miller wrote: I know that personally I haven't been able to contribute the amount of time I'd like to make this succeed. But I have a full-time job and a young child, and am mildly active in umpteen other projects. Legacy support is hard work, and really needs two or three full-time workers to be a success. It's tempting to blame the lack of volunteers, but this sort of project works best if there's a solid base. The Fedora Infrastructure team recently sent out an announce mail to let people know they could use a couple of extra hands. Already a couple of people mailed that team and said they could help out. Maybe Fedora Legacy should send out such an email? I think we sent out one before the Infrastructure team did.. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. As noted, I disagree with the above statement. Here is what I think can happen. A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. But, then there is no trust in the project. You said you would support it until December, and people depend on that. If you drop it now, then where is the trust? How can we be sure you will support FC5 for the length of time you claim, rather than just dropping it? Is 2 months really worth losing trust over? B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. Then why haven't we started doing this yet? C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. I think this is fine for FC releases. No problem... It is in line with the FC philosophy. Somewhere in there convince Luke Macken to do the work to get a Fedora Update tool available for use externally that does the boring stuff like generate the email with the checksums and with the subpackage list and all that boring stuff. It could even handle moving the bug to 'MODIFIED' when it goes in updates-testing, and finally to CLOSED when it goes to release. Then it would be easier to get people to contribute, as they'd just be doing things like checking out a package module, copying a patch from somewhere, commit, build. That would help a lot. Somebody more senior in the project would fiddle with the tool to prepare the update, and do the sign+push. Is he the only one who can do this stuff? Does he need help? I honestly think that doing these things is the only way that Legacy will survive. I agree with all but dropping RHL 2 months early. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Thursday 19 October 2006 12:04, Matthew Miller wrote: So RHL has been the hold-up there? In that case, *definitely* time to end RHL support; RHL != Fedora anyway. IMHO, Fedora Legacy was started for RHL, not FC, and the name is shouldn't dictate policy, the original purpose should dictate policy. My thoughts too. I keep trying to be nice to these people, and they never help out. So screw 'em. /personal opinion Yeah, and when offers of help are met with resistence, people do tend to not help out. When people say stuff like So screw 'em then people tend to not help out. I really, really think the bugzilla process should be moved to be more normal, too -- one bug # per release, even if the issue is identical in FC3 and FC4. (That's why there's the clone bug bugzilla feature.) Absolutely. This works much better when the update tool can automanage bugs, so that each gets closed when the update goes out, and we're not so tied to every release must be fixed for the bug to be closed. (note, there can be a top level tracker but for the CVE itself, and individual bugs are cloned for each vuln Fedora release) So, hey, here's an idea: Let's do that! What's the hold up? C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. Yes. Better this than nothing. No problem for FC releases. Since there is only 2 months left on RHL, there isn't much of a problem there either (in particular if you set the period of time to be a month or one week before the EOL date, which ever comes first. Yes. How much work will this convincing take? Does he accept bribes? I think he does. A lot of it is a time issue. Again, could he use help with this? If so, what kind of help? Even gentle encouragement? Or money? Or coding support? Or documentation support? Or??? -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 10:48, Eric Rostetter wrote: IMHO, Fedora Legacy was started for RHL, not FC, and the name is shouldn't dictate policy, the original purpose should dictate policy. Actually no. Fedora Legacy came from when Fedora was created. Fedora Alternatives and Extras were other proposed projects. I picked up Legacy because I wanted to provide Fedora to my customers, and provide them a slightly longer life span. I was persuaded to do updates for RHL too, which I really think was a mistake. My thoughts too. I keep trying to be nice to these people, and they never help out. So screw 'em. /personal opinion Yeah, and when offers of help are met with resistence, people do tend to not help out. When people say stuff like So screw 'em then people tend to not help out. Where we need help is testing packages, reporting and vetting issues (not just 'hey this CVE was filed, does it effect us?' Actually LOOK at the package and package sources to see, perhaps provide a patch? Where are you meeting resistance doing this kind of work? I really, really think the bugzilla process should be moved to be more normal, too -- one bug # per release, even if the issue is identical in FC3 and FC4. (That's why there's the clone bug bugzilla feature.) Absolutely. This works much better when the update tool can automanage bugs, so that each gets closed when the update goes out, and we're not so tied to every release must be fixed for the bug to be closed. (note, there can be a top level tracker but for the CVE itself, and individual bugs are cloned for each vuln Fedora release) So, hey, here's an idea: Let's do that! What's the hold up? Getting software in place. Time. Energy. C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. Yes. Better this than nothing. No problem for FC releases. Since there is only 2 months left on RHL, there isn't much of a problem there either (in particular if you set the period of time to be a month or one week before the EOL date, which ever comes first. Yes. How much work will this convincing take? Does he accept bribes? I think he does. A lot of it is a time issue. Again, could he use help with this? If so, what kind of help? Even gentle encouragement? Or money? Or coding support? Or documentation support? Or??? I don't know. Email him. Find out. He's on the fedora infrastructure team which has this listed as one of the projects. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure Don't wait on me to make it happen. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgp9qqENtwraL.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 10:52, Eric Rostetter wrote: You're misunderstanding me; I meant RHL has been the hold-up for switching to the Extras build infrastructure. Can't we somehow run the two build systems in parallel? Use the old one for RHL, and test the new one out for FC releases? That way we also get a good test in, and have a backup if the new build system isn't working right, etc. Only if we agree to split RHL updates from Fedora updates and nothold one up for the other. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgpTrcH3J1zGu.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 11:36, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: I just have enough time currently to answer questions for people on #fedora-legacy, trying to put in 10-20 hours to qa a package because I don't know how much qa it really takes to ship a fix (especially after all the negative feedback when we put out a patch that 'broke' systems). Yikes, 10-20 hours seems CRAZY. It built, patch applied, app launches, push it as a testing update. (sure you could do a LITTLE more testing, but trying to fit 20 hours of heavy qa on an app is just silly) -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgpILFvYZ3h85.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 12:21, Jesse Keating wrote: Yikes, 10-20 hours seems CRAZY. It built, patch applied, app launches, push it as a testing update. (sure you could do a LITTLE more testing, but trying to fit 20 hours of heavy qa on an app is just silly) I should note that the only way we'll REALLY know its qad is if people use it in similar setups to their system, and updates-testing is usually the only way to get packages to them for testing. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgpYq6GwHySpv.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 10:59:39AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote: Only if we agree to split RHL updates from Fedora updates and nothold one up for the other. This is another benefit of one bug per distro release. FC3 packages shouldn't hold up FC4, for that matter. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 11:36, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: On 10/20/06, Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Friday 20 October 2006 10:48, Eric Rostetter wrote: IMHO, Fedora Legacy was started for RHL, not FC, and the name is shouldn't dictate policy, the original purpose should dictate policy. Actually no. Fedora Legacy came from when Fedora was created. Fedora Alternatives and Extras were other proposed projects. I picked up Legacy because I wanted to provide Fedora to my customers, and provide them a slightly longer life span. I was persuaded to do updates for RHL too, which I really think was a mistake. I am getting deja-vu from the last time we tried fixing things about 6 months ago. I think the problem isn't RHL updates, Fedora updates etc. The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and temporary schedule changes that have become permanent. I just have enough time currently to answer questions for people on #fedora-legacy, trying to put in 10-20 hours to qa a package because I don't know how much qa it really takes to ship a fix (especially after all the negative feedback when we put out a patch that 'broke' systems). Most of the other people who have been really interested in the project have been interested in a certain release (FC1, RHL-7.2, etc) and once we stopped supporting it, they went away. I really do not know of anyone new who has wanted to support FC-4 or FC-5 in 4 months. Maybe the question we should be asking is: Can we do this? We don't have the number of people that Debian Security has on supporting old releases.. and because we have fallen so far behind with everything.. can we dig ourselves out.. or do we need to completely reboot the whole thing (new people, new goals, new name) with the new people really knowing that A) we arent going to get much help from 3rd party vendors B) we arent going to get much help from the community I'd comment that for this fedora user at least, the security etc stuffs should be extended at least to the point where we each of us, has a system, old though it may be in FC years, that works and does everything WE want it to do. Throwing us to the wolves doesn't make me want to format and update at anywhere near the release cycle for FC. My email archive alone goes back into 1998 here. Yes, there are backups, and I do them rather religiously at the feet of a gal named amanda, but it would still be a weeks work to get stuff back to the Just Works(TM) state here if I was to put FC5 on this box today. But after an extended rattlesnake sorting session on my lappy, FC5 is now looking working pretty good, so FC6 will probably get installed when its out or shortly after. But I'm not about to do this every 6 months as planned by the FC people, I have other things these machines need to do, and do on a set it up in cron so I can forget about it scenario. My $0.02, adjust for inflation. :-) C) etc -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 10:59:13AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote: Where we need help is testing packages, reporting and vetting issues (not just 'hey this CVE was filed, does it effect us?' Actually LOOK at the package and package sources to see, perhaps provide a patch? Where are you meeting resistance doing this kind of work? Although, hey, this CVE was filed, does it affect us in bugzilla is helpful too as a starting point -- a lot of issues which do affect us aren't even that far along at this point. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:36:15AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and temporary schedule changes that have become permanent. Yes. In order to survive the project needs some real support from Red Hat. (Or some other large company who wants to do Red Hat a favor, but that seems even less likely.) Using the Chasm marketing model [*], without Legacy, Fedora is only a viable solution for Early Adopters and of dubious value to the second Pragmatist group. However, Fedora has been enough of a success that many Pragmatists are indeed using Fedora. This results in large numbers of FC2, FC3, FC4 machines in production beyond their supported lifetime. Pragmatists, by their nature, don't wanna be upgrading all the time. Without Legacy, they're best served by CentOS and kin. That's fine, but it's a loss for Fedora, as they're then less likely to feed back into Extras, etc. And it's also a problem because it results in large numbers of potentially vulnerable machines in the wild. Fedora people repeatedly state that the distribution is great for users beyond the tech-enthusiast Earlier Adopters. But without Legacy, it's really not true. * http://www.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 08:58:33AM -0400, James Kosin wrote: E) See if any Fedora Core engineers are interested in, out of the goodness of their hearts, building updates for their packages in Legacy when it isn't much extra work -- and enabling them to easily do so. The only problem with this is WHY ever go with the latest FC6 or 7 or whatever if you can have the packages updated to the latest even if you have FC2. I really don't think that's a major concern. Most packages wouldn't be updated to the newest version -- just the ones where that's the easiest thing to do. Legacy is all about security-updates!!! ONLY!!! The policy is update with PATCHES if at all possible. From RH even better; otherwise fall back to other sources for patches such as the development groups, etc. Only if EVERYTHING else fails, you can update to the latest stable release to fix the flaw. Right now, everything is clearly failing. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Friday 20 October 2006 10:52, Eric Rostetter wrote: You're misunderstanding me; I meant RHL has been the hold-up for switching to the Extras build infrastructure. Can't we somehow run the two build systems in parallel? Use the old one for RHL, and test the new one out for FC releases? That way we also get a good test in, and have a backup if the new build system isn't working right, etc. Only if we agree to split RHL updates from Fedora updates and nothold one up for the other. Fine with me. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 13:58, Eric Rostetter wrote: First, my interest doesn't really fit there. It is in testing what is in updates-testing (which is nothing). If there was something in updates-testing to test, I would test it and report the results. Its tough to get to updates-testing without the pre-work done. So thats where we need the help right now. Secondly, I've offered to help many times with other infrastructure issues, and been turned down over and over. Where? When? You refused to use IRC, you've refused to even try to get a wiki account. Third, when I've tried to help test packages before updates-testing, I met with lots of trouble. Someone: No, you have to do this, this way, not that way! Me: Okay, where's that documented? Someone: No where. Me: Okay, I'll document that and resubmit Someone: No, you still missed Step X. Me: Okay, where is that documented? Someone: No where. Me: Okay, I'll document that... And so on. Eventually of course, my documentation is no longer good because it is a web page and now it should all be wiki, and I don't have access to the wiki. By the time I finally get access to the wiki, I've lost interest. When did you try to get a wiki account? We always welcome more documentation. Third, I had a big project that took about a year of my life, during which I could not spend a lot of time of FL work. That is over now, and I could go back to working on FL again, but I really don't see where I'm needed now. I've outlined what help we need. The fact that I only have one FC machine to play with (FC 3 x86_64 now, could upgrade to FC4 or what ever if needed) doesn't help. I'm willing to put it towards FL work if you tell me what you need me to do. But you can't expect me to do everything any more than I expect you to do everything. And as long as you keep refusing my offers to help saying you'll do it yourself, you won't get many unsolicited offers from me, so you better start soliciting if you want anything. So, hey, here's an idea: Let's do that! What's the hold up? Getting software in place. Time. Energy. Is there anything I can do to help, or not? Again, I don't know, you'd have to ask Luke and / or the Infrastructure team. Again, could he use help with this? If so, what kind of help? Even gentle encouragement? Or money? Or coding support? Or documentation support? Or??? I don't know. Email him. Find out. He's on the fedora infrastructure team which has this listed as one of the projects. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure Don't wait on me to make it happen. Is there a particular reason to contact only him instead of the whole infrastructure team? Mostly because he owns the project. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgpAxNbXQG0oY.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Fedora people repeatedly state that the distribution is great for users beyond the tech-enthusiast Earlier Adopters. But without Legacy, it's really not true. It is only good for tech-savy people who can upgrade outside of pre-set windows. Legacy extends this to tech-savy people who can upgrade at some point during the year. Someday the Fedora Documentation Project along with Fedora Legacy (if it survives) may extend this to non-tech-savy people who can upgrade within a year... Let's face it. Fedora Legacy use is limited. The fact that some Fedora people say otherwise doesn't make it true. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 01:19:08PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: My email archive alone goes back into 1998 here. Yes, there are backups, and I do them rather religiously at the feet of a gal named amanda, but it would still be a weeks work to get stuff back to the Just Works(TM) state here if I was to put FC5 on this box today. Eh? How come? Not that I am trying to tell you upgrade right now but I have around machines which went through numerous release upgrades, some with original installations dating back to times of RH6.x realeases or maybe even earlier, and it never took me weeks to do such thing. Rather small hours when most of the time I was doing something else when a machine was busy installing updated packages. I am not trying to imply that there is no work involved. It is easier when you can do that over a network or from DVD, or otherwise you have to babysit a machine and switch CDs from time to time, but I never had a situation that such operation destroyed my data or made a machine inoperable. It is also true that after such step there is some cleanup to perform; but with possible small exceptions this is not extremely urgent and can be done here and there at your leisure. 'rpm -qa --last' will make you a list where possible leftovers are easy to pick up and you should go through assorted '.rpmnew' and '.rpmsave' files. 'locate' is of a great help here after you updated its database. On some occasions I did even such nasty things as 'rpm -Uvh --nodeps fedora-release*', with that rpm from a target distro, followed by 'yum update yum* rpm* python*' and after that 'yum update ...' (various things as needed), but such trickery may require assorted manual interventions which depend on what you really have already installed and falls into if you have to ask how to do that you should not be doing it category. Still it worked fine in the final account (with a different set of tradeoffs than a normal update). Yes, I know that some claim that to upgrade a release one should do an install from scratch and restore personal data from backups. Unless you really messed up previously your installation doing things like 'rpm --Uvh --nodeps ...' all over the place, and other nasties of that sort, this is misguided. But after an extended rattlesnake sorting session on my lappy, FC5 is now looking working pretty good, so FC6 will probably get installed when its out or shortly after. But I'm not about to do this every 6 months as planned by the FC people, I have other things these machines need to do, and do on a set it up in cron so I can forget about it scenario. My $0.02, adjust for inflation. :-) C) etc -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved. -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Friday 20 October 2006 13:58, Eric Rostetter wrote: First, my interest doesn't really fit there. It is in testing what is in updates-testing (which is nothing). If there was something in updates-testing to test, I would test it and report the results. Its tough to get to updates-testing without the pre-work done. So thats where we need the help right now. Yes, true. But, like I said, you can't expect one person to do everything... If we had a way to know what work needed to be done, it might be easier for people like me to help. Long ago I suggested that there be a mailing list for entries in bugzilla, and while it was received well by many on this list, it was rejected by you. If I got an e-mail saying we need to test package X, and I decided I could test package X, I would do it. But I don't have the time to go crawling through bugzilla looking to see what needs to be tested, and I've not seen a mailing to this list lately with a list of things that needed testing. In other words, I personally respond better to a push to me of what is needed than having to expend effort to pull what is needed from various sources. Secondly, I've offered to help many times with other infrastructure issues, and been turned down over and over. Where? When? You refused to use IRC, you've refused to even try to get a wiki account. Yes, I basically refuse to use IRC. If that means I can't help with FL, then so be it. That's your problem. My requests to help go back to the beginning, like setting up CVS for the web site, a web-interface to the CVS, a mailing list for the CVS, etc. You refused all that help, saying you already planned to do that kind of stuff and would do it yourself, etc. You did setup the CVS, but none of the rest. I've never managed to get access to change bugzilla entry white boards, etc. though I've asked about it, etc. As for a wiki access, I _did_ get it. But, I'm really never been sure how you plan to split the web site and wiki, if at all, and what you want done, and personally I _hate_ the idea of putting everything in the wiki. I specifically hate putting the advisories in the wiki, but you say you want to. Well, so be it, but I've not seen any work done to do it, and I've not been asked to help in doing so. I'll document that... And so on. Eventually of course, my documentation is no longer good because it is a web page and now it should all be wiki, and I don't have access to the wiki. By the time I finally get access to the wiki, I've lost interest. When did you try to get a wiki account? We always welcome more documentation. I _did_ get access to the wiki (though I don't know if it still works or not). In fact I say that above where you quote me. Third, I had a big project that took about a year of my life, during which I could not spend a lot of time of FL work. That is over now, and I could go back to working on FL again, but I really don't see where I'm needed now. I've outlined what help we need. No, you said we need lots of stuff. I said, okay, I'm trying to do some of that stuff. You said, no, we need this other stuff since the stuff I want to do can't be done until the other stuff is done... Well, fine, if I have to do that other stuff I'm willing, if it is made easy for me to do. Is anyone willing to make it easier for me to do? Again, I don't know, you'd have to ask Luke and / or the Infrastructure team. I'll reread the thread, and _if_ I understand what is desired, I'll approach them about it. If not, then I'll _try_ to get someone here to explain to me what it is I'm supposed to ask them. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
Quoting Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED]: But I don't have the time to go crawling through bugzilla looking to see what needs to be tested, and I've not seen a mailing to this list lately with a list of things that needed testing. In other words, I Please read the above. And for a while Pekka was posting a list of all the work needed items. Was that not usable? I don't remember the discussion of a mailing list for bugs, Yes, it was, but as I said, I've not seen one for a while... there is a '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' email alias, if you want on that, by all means I'll add you. I do know that I don't want bug discussion to happen on a list and out of the bug. Correct, it should be a one-way mailing only. Yes, if you want me to help, please add me to [EMAIL PROTECTED] When this was happening, I had thought you had left the project, so it wasn't much of a thought process. I've never left the project, I've just become much less active in it. I would like EVERYTHING except advisories (see above) and the GPG keys. David Eisenstein has done a lot of work of porting some content over, I'm sure he'd like a hand with that. I like the wiki as it is a LOT lower overhead to contribute content, make updates as things change, refine processes, interlink with other Fedora documentation such as how to use the CVS system, how to get an account, how to use the build system, etc... Okay, I'll take you at your word on the above. And I'll just keep my own opinions about it to myself where they belong. -- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin Go Longhorns! -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Friday 20 October 2006 15:16, Eric Rostetter wrote: Yes, if you want me to help, please add me to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You've been added. -- Jesse Keating Release Engineer: Fedora pgpYLRQYfyfNc.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On 10/20/06, Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:36:15AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and temporary schedule changes that have become permanent. Yes. In order to survive the project needs some real support from Red Hat. (Or some other large company who wants to do Red Hat a favor, but that seems even less likely.) Using the Chasm marketing model [*], without Legacy, Fedora is only a viable solution for Early Adopters and of dubious value to the second Pragmatist group. However, Fedora has been enough of a success that many Pragmatists are indeed using Fedora. I would argue that the pragmatists had been using it out of a trust model. They had used Red Hat Linux when it has crossed the chasm, and were using Fedora out of the same trust model. However, Fedora seems to have only been for Early Adopters. Legacy was an added on idea by people who realized that if you are going to put service software in an OS, people arent going to want to upgrade every 6 months. The problem with that is that maintaining an OS is always more effort/cost than creating it. That is why Pragmatists, Conservatives, and Laggards are better suited with an Enterprise linux. The problem with trying to stay on the Early Adopter side is that they will most likely drop you for the next shiney thing (Gentoo 3 years ago, Ubuntu today, xPath in 3 years) Fedora people repeatedly state that the distribution is great for users beyond the tech-enthusiast Earlier Adopters. But without Legacy, it's really not true. To be honest, there are only 2 reasons I use Fedora these days: 1) I drank the Bob Young koolaid long ago, and I am too much an RPM man to change to something else.. and 2) I use Fedora to alpha/beta test for the next/current Red Hat Enterprise. Even if Red Hat does not use Fedora as a alpha/beta test for Red Hat Enterprise.. I and many other people who are RHEL/Centos/etc customers do. I use Fedora because I need to know what the next RHEL will have in it. I use it to see what tools in extras I can pull over to my production systems because I need a plone, git, or other tool for some project. I do like having the nice new distro every 6 to 9 months, but I don't get paid to have it... and I am not longer the young kid who has time to twiddle with all the nobs to find out why something isnt working. * http://www.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html Heh. I hadn't seen that for a long time. Erik Sink was sort of my boss before I went to work for Red Hat. The books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado should be required reading for anyone dealing with emerging markets. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
http://lwn.net/Articles/204722/ This is subscriber-only content for two weeks, but the gist is: there's a whole lotta unpatched vulnerabilities in FC4. Can we really pretend this is an ongoing concern? I know that personally I haven't been able to contribute the amount of time I'd like to make this succeed. But I have a full-time job and a young child, and am mildly active in umpteen other projects. Legacy support is hard work, and really needs two or three full-time workers to be a success. It's tempting to blame the lack of volunteers, but this sort of project works best if there's a solid base. When Jesse Keating worked at Pogo, that was largely true, but with his duties at RH and with his new kid, it doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I'm sure this is not Jesse's fault -- there needs to be commitment from above, and that's clearly not the case. I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Thursday 19 October 2006 11:44, Matthew Miller wrote: When Jesse Keating worked at Pogo, that was largely true, but with his duties at RH and with his new kid, it doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I'm sure this is not Jesse's fault -- there needs to be commitment from above, and that's clearly not the case. I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. Here is what I think can happen. A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. Somewhere in there convince Luke Macken to do the work to get a Fedora Update tool available for use externally that does the boring stuff like generate the email with the checksums and with the subpackage list and all that boring stuff. It could even handle moving the bug to 'MODIFIED' when it goes in updates-testing, and finally to CLOSED when it goes to release. Then it would be easier to get people to contribute, as they'd just be doing things like checking out a package module, copying a patch from somewhere, commit, build. That would help a lot. Somebody more senior in the project would fiddle with the tool to prepare the update, and do the sign+push. I honestly think that doing these things is the only way that Legacy will survive. -- Jesse Keating RHCE (geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) pgp6BazXvdPlf.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Matthew Miller wrote: A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. So RHL has been the hold-up there? ... That is an incorrect conclusion. FWIW, Marc was the most active contributor, only interested in FC1, but willing to do the work for other versions as well. Up until some time ago, I was willing to help but my interest was only the RHLs but was willing ot do PUBLISH/VERIFY for other versions in order to get RHL updates. There were a couple of other people who did some VERIFYs and proposed a couple of packages. That's it. A better phrasing could maybe be that RHL/old distros was what kept FL going, because those had significant deployment base before people realized that trying to use Fedora and expect long maintenance wasn't a good idea (and hence folks moved to CentOS). You could say that there is some problem with the process if e.g., sendmail MIME vulnerability updates (which are declared ready) haven't been published during the 1.5 months they've been ready [1]. I guess the issue is that no one with privileges to send the notification or move stuff from updates-testing to updates has been around during that time. As a result, there are very few people left who care enough about FC3/FC4 updates. There just aren't enough people to do the job, and the machinery to do the job has been way too heavyweight for a long time. I guess one could still move the FC3/FC4 stuff to extras (instead of just declaring the project dead) but I doubt the number of contributors is going to rise dramatically as a result even if extras were used. Some administrative overhead would be reduced but you'd someone would still be needed to do the work. [1] http://netcore.fi/pekkas/buglist.html https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=195418 -- Pekka Savola You each name yourselves king, yet the Netcore Oykingdom bleeds. Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 08:57:31PM +0300, Pekka Savola wrote: On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Matthew Miller wrote: A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. So RHL has been the hold-up there? ... That is an incorrect conclusion. You're misunderstanding me; I meant RHL has been the hold-up for switching to the Extras build infrastructure. time. I guess one could still move the FC3/FC4 stuff to extras (instead of just declaring the project dead) but I doubt the number of contributors is going to rise dramatically as a result even if extras were used. Some administrative overhead would be reduced but you'd someone would still be needed to do the work. Agreed. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Thursday 19 October 2006 13:57, Pekka Savola wrote: As a result, there are very few people left who care enough about FC3/FC4 updates. There just aren't enough people to do the job, and the machinery to do the job has been way too heavyweight for a long time. I guess one could still move the FC3/FC4 stuff to extras (instead of just declaring the project dead) but I doubt the number of contributors is going to rise dramatically as a result even if extras were used. Some administrative overhead would be reduced but you'd someone would still be needed to do the work. A good chunk of my proposal is removing administrative overhead. Its overhead now because we have to manually assemble the email, do write out the content, checksome the packages, push them around etc.. Its VERY cumbersome, and requires a lot of permissions I'm not happy about giving folks. Moving it to Extras and tying into existing scripts or slightly new scripts to do most the work would lighten the load SIGNIFICANTLY. -- Jesse Keating RHCE (geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) pgpLOdtRkh4xv.pgp Description: PGP signature -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On 10/19/06, Jesse Keating [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thursday 19 October 2006 11:44, Matthew Miller wrote: When Jesse Keating worked at Pogo, that was largely true, but with his duties at RH and with his new kid, it doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I'm sure this is not Jesse's fault -- there needs to be commitment from above, and that's clearly not the case. I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be _part_ of its mission. Here is what I think can happen. A) Kill off RHL now. Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have the man power or the volunteers. B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages. They're ready for us for FC3 and FC4. C) Move to Core style updates process. Spin a possible update, toss it in -testing. If nobody says boo after a period of time, release the darn thing. If somebody finds it to be broken, fix it and resubmit. D) Move to Core style plan. Figure out what core packages we are going to backport for, and what packages we are just going to push the latest stuff for. Mozilla - Seamonkey Gaim - Gaim latest etc. -- Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
Re: lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy
On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 05:07:30PM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: D) Move to Core style plan. Figure out what core packages we are going to backport for, and what packages we are just going to push the latest stuff for. Mozilla - Seamonkey Gaim - Gaim latest Yeah. And also, if at all possible, E) See if any Fedora Core engineers are interested in, out of the goodness of their hearts, building updates for their packages in Legacy when it isn't much extra work -- and enabling them to easily do so. -- Matthew Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mattdm.org/ Boston University Linux -- http://linux.bu.edu/ -- fedora-legacy-list mailing list fedora-legacy-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-legacy-list
