package stability

[Mike McGrath]

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 08:46:16AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
>   
>>>  
>>>       
>> I'll make a deal with you, if you can pay our volunteers what RH pays 
>> its engineers to do the type of backporting required to make the ABI's 
>> stay the same and we'll see to it that the EPEL packages are just like 
>> the RHEL ones.  Otherwise this is a lesson in learning that you can't 
>>     
>
> I don't get it. Fedora extras is run by volunteers that are not paid
> by RH, still is is ver successfull. Why do you want somebody to pay?
> Why not rely on volunteers? It is all EPEL is about?
Fedora extras supports a lifecycle that is less than two years.  
Typically about 1 year.  EPEL is different, requiring many years.  If I 
release nagios 2.7 right now in EPEL (which I have), I'll still be 
maintaining it in 2010[1].  At which point in time nagios might not even 
exist anymore, or it could be at version 5.3.  The fact is there is NO 
way you're going to get me to do backports of it if a vulnerability is 
found.  Its just not going to happen, mostly because I'm a terribly 
crappy programmer.  Packagers != programmers.  Backporting requires 
skilled labor which not everyone (including myself) will be able to do 
for antient packages (which nagios 2.7 will be by 2010).


    -Mike


[1] 2010 when RHEL4 is EOLing