lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

[Pekka Savola]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Matthew Miller wrote:
>> A) Kill off RHL now.  Stop trying to do stuff there when we just don't have
>> the man power or the volunteers.
>> B) Move to using Extras infrastructure for building packages.  They're
>> ready for us for FC3 and FC4.
>
> So RHL has been the hold-up there? ...

That is an incorrect conclusion.

FWIW, Marc was the most active contributor, only interested in FC1, 
but willing to do the work for other versions as well.  Up until some 
time ago, I was willing to help but my interest was only the RHLs but 
was willing ot do PUBLISH/VERIFY for other versions in order to get 
RHL updates.  There were a couple of other people who did some VERIFYs 
and proposed a couple of packages. That's it.

A better phrasing could maybe be that RHL/old distros was what kept FL 
going, because those had significant deployment base before people 
realized that trying to use Fedora and expect long maintenance wasn't 
a good idea (and hence folks moved to CentOS).

You could say that there is some problem with the process if e.g., 
sendmail MIME vulnerability updates (which are declared "ready") 
haven't been published during the 1.5 months they've been ready [1]. I 
guess the issue is that no one with privileges to send the 
notification or move stuff from updates-testing to updates has been 
around during that time.

As a result, there are very few people left who care enough about 
FC3/FC4 updates.  There just aren't enough people to do the job, and 
the machinery to do the job has been way too heavyweight for a long 
time.  I guess one could still move the FC3/FC4 stuff to extras 
(instead of just declaring the project dead) but I doubt the number of 
contributors is going to rise dramatically as a result even if extras 
were used.  Some administrative overhead would be reduced but you'd 
someone would still be needed to do the work.

[1]
http://netcore.fi/pekkas/buglist.html
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=195418

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings