Old kernel RPMS

[Sean]

On Sun, March 13, 2005 1:59 pm, Paul Iadonisi said:

I'm afraid I have to agree with Jeff here, Paul.<g>

>   What I'm referring to is the relatively quick disappearance of
> previous updates, as well previous versions from rawhide.  A concern
> I've had about official updates disappearing, at least with respect to
> GPL/LGPL licensed software, is that these older updates should be made
> available for as long as the GPL requires (3 years?).  Currently, they

No, you're only required to provide 3 year availability if you neglect to
distribute source code along with object code in the first place.  Notice
that section 3b of the GPLv2 is not enforced if distribution is carried
out in accordance with section 3a.

> disappear when new updates show up (or shortly thereafter).
>   I wouldn't worry about the licensing issue too much with rawhide given
> that it is 'in development' stuff, but it's still a bit extreme, IMO,
> for previous versions to disappear from the download.fedora.redhat.com
> immediately on appearance of the next version.
>   I'm not naive, here: I do know that keeping two or three versions
> around means significant disk space concerns, not just for Red Hat, but
> for all the mirrors.  Maybe a separate tree that a maximum of three
> versions could be maintained and instead of the rawhide update mechanism
> doing 'rm <rpm>', it could do 'mv <rpm> <backupdir>/<rpm>'.  Mirrors can
> choose to mirror the backup dir or not.
>   That's simplified of course, but I'm trying to promote some discussion
> of this.  It's burned me more than once.

Anyone who sees a need for this service could provide it for themselves or
for others.  But developers probably have less of a need for this than
testers do.

Sean