RFC: Fedora Extras EOL Policy

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:11:02 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:

> >  * With terms like "end-of-life", "life-cycle", "maintenance state" come
> > promises with regard to the expectations raised by our users. It is
> > important that we don't keep a legacy branch open just because parts of
> > the contributor community insist on publishing updates for it, while the
> > majority has moved on to do only the current branches.
> 
> Why not? If a part of the community is willing to maintain a package, they
> should be able to do it.

That would be the "some do, some don't" playground.

We try to move away from Fedora Extras being a second class citizen.

We cannot do that as long as we lack a well-defined life-cycle compared
with Fedora Core. And when we distinguish between active (i.e. maintained,
"supported") branches, legacy branches and dead branches, we need policies
which allow for improved security response times, e.g. through the work of
a Fedora Extras security response team, which under well-defined
conditions may touch packages in _all_ branches. Whether these are the
same people who would maintain legacy branches, is an unimportant detail.

And yes, we do need improved and stricter policies on how to handle
orphaned packages.