Fedora Core 3 Transferred to Fedora Legacy

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2006-01-27 at 09:07 -0500, Robert Locke wrote:
> > 
> > From: Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de>
> > On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 16:59 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
> <snip>

> Watching this thread, what is with all this demanding?
> 
> Red Hat is a member of this Fedora community and is giving us lots of
> code.  You are a member of this community and giving us lots of help
> through the "Extras" package.  Thank you, by the way, for doing more
> than just receiving.
If RH's attitude doesn't improve towards collaboration, my attitude will
turn ;)

> But, how do we demand something of a community member?  Turning the
> tide a bit perhaps....  I don't know anything about which packages you
> maintain for Extras, but I demand that you offer your packages for the
> PowerPC architecture on Fedora Core 1 for the next seven years (I am
> trying to pick something outrageous - if you cannot see my tongue
> planted in my cheek).  How can I demand that?

We weren't talking about 7 years, we are talking about a few months ;)

> Now everything that we "demand", Red Hat has to weigh against their
> current workload to see if it generates a lot of work
That's what they want to make you believe, but what I consider to be an
urban legend. From my experience, with very few exceptions, extending
life time doesn't introduce a lot of work, because

a) FC3 already is out for many months, so it can be considered
sufficiently stable and really critical bugs/showstoppers already to
have been ironed-out.

This means, the likelihood for such bugs to happen is fairly small, and
if their importance in most cases to be fairly low.


b) Major updates/development changes are supposed to occur on Rawhide.
Nobody can expect them to happen on FC3 or FC4.

I.e. except for severe security bugs, extending EOL of FC3, to
maintainers condenses to monitoring PRs and to react if something
critically happens. In probably the vast majority of cases, such
critical bugs also affect FC4 and Rawhide, so maintainers would have to
investigate PRs in any case. So, in probably the vast majority of cases,
extending life time for few months, doesn't mean much additional work.


c) Whether PR are processed by RH employees/Rawhide maintainers or
others is irrelevant to users. The point that matters to users, is
seeing a "continuous flow" of their distro, and not having to intervene
into their system.

I.e. it all is a matter of organization, coordination and collaboration.
One way to achieve this would be RH to silently let the "legacy team"
take over maintenance, and continue to ship packages through Core.


>   While I am sure that you have a big heart and that you are supplying
> the packages to Extras simply because of that heart (i.e. you are not
> actually using them yourself),
Not quite, ... 

>  most folks are going to do something because of some benefit....
... I am using FE as means to tailor Fedora to better meet my local
needs.  I contribute packages to FE and share packages with the
community, am really using and I would be packaging in any case.

As I said earlier in this thread, the price has shown to be high and to
balance the benefits from FE. 

> But let's stop "demanding" and spend more effort "discussing" how we
> can move forward.
Well, this would require for the "RH-mountain" to move ;)

Ralf