On 22/01/13 16:18, Robert Wood wrote: ... > As an aside, I find it contradictory that we don't have an LTS so have > to completely reinstall every eighteen months, yet we are often quite > behind on latest releases/bleeding edge stuff like this. > > Thanks. :~)
Releases are every 9 months and upgrades are supported. We're currently approaching release number 3. At what stage did other distributions get an LTS, out of interest? I'd like to see an LTS too but at the moment I don't think we have the resources to properly maintain one. I'd personally prefer we wait until we can properly support one than agree to one which could be detrimental to Mageia as a whole. Let me explain what I mean. Speaking from a QA perspective, despite our best efforts there are still only a very small handful of people (think 2 or 3) whose job it is to test every single update you receive on each architecture (currently i586 & x86_64). So each update is tested at least twice at the moment, assuming we don't find any problems and have to retest. Arm support is also anticipated in the future. When Mageia 3 is arrives we will be supporting 2 live releases again (mga2 & mga3) which instantly doubles the amount of work we have in QA. On top of this we also have ISO testing, pre-release testing of the ISOs before they are sent to the mirrors. ISO testing takes away one week of every 4, roughly, in the build up to the final release. We're expecting backports to open at some stage aswell. Inevitably, we struggle with the sheer volume of work. When backports do open it will add to that workload. Were we to also have an LTS with current manpower levels each release would suffer. How can you help you ask? Easy! Get involved and help us testing updates :) https://wiki.mageia.org/en/QA_Team Thanks Claire (MrsB)
