[Mageia-dev] Mageia 1 EOL.

Sun Dec 2 03:36:36 CET 2012

Pierre Jarillon wrote:
+> Le dimanche 2 décembre 2012 01:11:44, Thomas Backlund a écrit :
+>> Mageia 1 is now EOL.
+>> 
+>> BS is locked down and updates_testing wiped.
+>> 
+>> Blog post pushed and mail sent to updates-announce ML.
+> 
+> I have several systems installed with Mageia 1 and I wish to move them to 
+> Mageia 3 (I make always a new install). During 4 or 5 month, I agree to have 
+> no improvements or no bug corrections but security updates are useful.
+> 
+> I dont' want to replace Mga1 with Mga2 and 4 month later play again for Mga2 
+> to Mga3. I have also other machines with Mga2 and with Mandriva 2010.2.
+> I dont need a LTS but a Short Term Support is a bad thing and I don't want to 
+> waste my time.
+> 
+> Is it possible to have security updates until a month after Mga3 is out?
+
+My feeling on this is that we have an 18 month support cycle *because* we have a 9 month development cycle, so we support for the length of 
+two release cycles, so that if one release causes major problems, or you don't have time to upgrade every single time, you can skip one 
+release and still stay supported.  This works fine unless a release gets delayed like Mageia 2 did (which is fine) and probably most will a 
+little bit at least.  I believe the support should continue to run until release+2 is out.
+
+The problem is there isn't a company with paid employees providing the support, it's a community distro with all volunteers, so we can only 
+continue to provide support if there are people willing and able to do the work.
+
+As you may know, I do a lot of the packaging work on security updates.  I also depend on some other packagers to do some of that work, but as 
+time passes, less and less of them have either the time or willingness to continue to work on Mageia 1, so it gets more difficult to continue 
+to support everything as time passes.  Also, even if we can get updates packaged, we need QA people to test them, and we continue to need 
+more help with QA, as it's a very small number of people doing the vast majority of the work.  QA is responsible for not only testing updates 
+for stable distros, but also testing every single ISO (including alphas, betas, and RCs) we release.
+
+So, to make a long story short, extending support for Mageia 1 was discussed by the council, but unfortunately rejected, mostly IINM because 
+of the burden on QA.  Again, that's not to blame anyone, but QA is a lot of work that's done by few people.  So if they're not willing or 
+able to continue to support it, unless new people step up to fill that void, we just don't have the ability to continue to provide support.
+
+As the person who does a lot of the packaging for security updates, I am willing to continue the work I do on it, especially since I haven't 
+had time yet to move my and my family's workstations to Mageia 2, and probably won't until late December, but I don't have a way to 
+distribute any new packages.  The build system has closed for Mageia 1.  SVN should still be open, so I suppose I could check things in there 
+and anyone interested could build from it locally?  I don't want to host my own repository somewhere.
+
+