a plan for updates after end of life

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Feb 09, 2008 at 09:05:34PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>
> In this plan, it appears everything is left to the maintainers as to how 
> long they want to provide updates at which point the end users can't rely 
> much on the service since some critical packages might turn out to be not 
> maintained while the rest of them are. If we are going to provide a 

The whole point of my proposal is that users know exactly which packages
are maintained. And it allows to start this with the interested
maintainers. It is unreasonable to expect to have the whole set of
packages maintained in the extended period, since it is well known that
only few maintainers are willing to maintain the packages for an
extended duration. But this may be very valuable in some settings for
some users.

> extended lifecycle, I believe we need to give users a more definitive time 
> period.

Since we cannot give a definitive time period, because it is volunteer
based, it is better not to give one.

> For two releases and a month (approx 13 months), we do the full updates as 
> we are doing currently. For another say 5 months or till the next release 
> we do only security fixes and very major bug fixes (as in crashes all the 
> time sort of bugs). We don't necessarily backport or guarantee ABI 

We don't have the manpower for that.

--
Pat