LWN article about us

[Stephen E. Dudek]

I've read the article and I have to agree with LWN:

"Keeping a distribution current with security patches is hard, tedious,
and often thankless work. It's the sort of work that people tend to
demand to be paid to do. Projects like Debian and Gentoo demonstrate
that this job can be done, and done well, on a volunteer basis, however.
But it would appear that the requisite effort is not there for the
Fedora Legacy project."

"People ... might want to think about what they can do to help the
Fedora Legacy project get its process restarted."

...

Taking a look at the bottom line at Dom's extremely helpful summary page
(http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~dom/legacy/issues.txt) seems to tell
the story:

Packages that have been verified and should be fully released
-------------------------------------------------------------

xpdf - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2186
gpdf - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2195

Packages waiting to be built for updates-testing
------------------------------------------------

yum - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1604
libxpm - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2075
openmotif - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2143
lesstiff - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2142
rp-pppoe - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2116
gtk2 - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2073
openoffice - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2074
squirrelmail - http://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2290
qt - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2002
sharutils - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2155
sox - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1945
gdk-pixbuf - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2005
ImageMagick - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2052 (but more?)
cdrecord - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2058
cups - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2127
iptables - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2252
nfs-utils - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2339
zlib - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2043
modutils - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2364
vim - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2343
xpdf - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2352
gpdf - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2353
ruby - https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2007

...

The bottleneck, to me, seems obvious.  Unless the Fedora Legacy 
Project can get items built into updates-testing (and released) in a
timely manner, then this project is doomed to fail.

I have tried to contribute in the past, but have become discouraged 
about the timeliness of the releases, especially for the tripwire 
release.  Issues concerning releases for 7.3 got bundled with 9, 
holding up the release for this and other packages.

I know for those who volunteer that this can be a thankless job, and 
for those of you who have contributed, thank you.  Perhaps a discussion
either on the list or in another forum of how to get those who seem to
be regular contributers (or potential ones) to fix the process.

On Thu, 2005-02-03 at 18:46, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> An article about us was posted a couple of weeks ago that I didn't see
> before: http://lwn.net/Articles/119892/
> 
> "Whither Fedora Legacy".
> 
> Cheers,
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