RH 8.0 support - a(nother) volunteer

[Jon Peatfield]

Just finally got round to subscribing to the list rather than lurking
and just reading the archives every other weekend...

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003 11:34:40 -0800 <jkeating j2solutions net> wrote:
> On Sunday 09 November 2003 11:28, Miskell, Craig wrote:
> > Where do I sign?
> 
> You just did.
> 
> Seriously though when we launch the server and website (hopefully at the 
> end of this month) there will be a section there for developer/member sign 
> up, where you'll be asked for your particulars, and then we'll have a 
> running list of who all is on the team.

Are the server sites mentioned above up/running now?  If so can
someone point me at them?

My department currently has ~180 RH80/x86 machines which (for various
reasons) can't possibly all be upgraded to RH9 (or Fedora-Core-1) by
2003-Dec-31.  I could try to explain why we didn't go to RH9 but that
seems to cause flames in some parts :-)

[ We havn't yet had time to elimanate our last few RH62/7x machines so
we already spend far too much effort building stuff for them.  I plan
to get those killed off (or heavily firewalled) before the end of the
year. ]

So anyway I'm willing to volunteer some of my time (and cpu for
building stuff etc) towards keeping RH80/x86 alive wrt security
patches etc (I don't really care about anything else -- if there is a
non security-related bug then we must be coping already :-).

Does anyone have any estimates of the total time/effort needed to
perform the relevant tests/builds/qa for a distro?

That is roughly how many people will I have to drum up (scrape from
other places etc), to be able to actually likely to be able to keep
the RH8.0 stuff fairly close to being secure?  e.g. If we have 4
volunteers for RH80/x86 would that be enough?

Can I assume that someone has already worked out the logistics for GPG
keysigning etc?

If I'm helping build/test stuff who do I need to know to get someone
to trust that a package I provide an update for is safe to be signed
by the fedora-legacy keys?  Would it require me to be known to the
right cabal?

BTW I'm also seriously considering (partly at least) switching to
Debian since I also have 45+ Alphas and it seems that nothing but
Debian supports those now.  Others here seem keen to push us towards
using SuSy, but that seems more effort than supporting RH80 until we
can move to a FC1 based system.

I'd be interested in helping test Fedora-Core on Alpha systems but I
guess that would be a different project :-)

--Jon

Jon Peatfield,  Computer Officer,  DAMTP,  University of Cambridge
Mail:  jp107 at damtp.cam.ac.uk     Web:  http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/