[repo-coord] Which distributions to support?

[Axel Thimm]

Hi repo maintainers,

what are your policies on EOLing distributions in your repo? And also
are you seeing any significant use of older distros on your servers?

The support burden, both in specfile exceptions and in infrastructure
setups, has probably reached far beyond the benefits of keeping
backwards compatibility with the added risk of supporting distros w/o
security updates. Recreating the metadata at ATrpms is going into
multiple hours these days (perhaps dumping some metadata formats
should also be considered) ...

Creating a common policy on this and coordinating EOL dates would not
be bad. Factors that should be considered are

o official EOL by vendor
o second tier EOL by organisations like Fedora Legacy or Progeny
o user demand
o infrastructural resources maintainer degradation ;=)

Thoughts?

[Jeff Pitman]

Post by Axel Thimm
Thoughts?

FWIW--because i haven't really worked on this in awhile--I'm considering
to just support Fedora the same way Core/Extras does. While legacy
sounds diplomatic, more than a majority of Fedora boxes will be
upgraded to a later version. For sure, FC1 is out the door. The FC2
machines I do have are probably slated for upgrade soon.

I dunno, maybe one behind Core/Extras policy; but, I don't think I'm
going to do the full Legacy policy (1-2-3, out). So, maybe FC2,FC3,
and FC4.

I've still got several rh7.3's laying around .. I need to think about
this one first. In my case, rh9 would actually be out the door before
rh7.3. But, rh7.3 is kind of nasty because you have to update core
packages to get anything to work. Updating core packages is against a
lot of repos policy. So, I see sunset coming for vers <= rh9 all over
the place.

That leaves rhel to deal with. Not sure when RHEL5 is coming, but I
presume supporting 2 versions is pretty decent. Updating core is even
more of a touchy issue on these versions. Of course, third party repos
are pretty touchy as well. For support, core needs to be relatively
unscathed. Rhel has a much longer release than Fedora and therefore
may have more of a tendency to gather dust. Anyway, I haven't even
setup environments to do RHEL builds yet... :( Probably build for
CentOS and call it good.

Now, metadata. I'm probably going to drop apt. md-xml supports yum and
smart.

just some random blurbs...

take care,