lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 10/20/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Friday 20 October 2006 10:48, Eric Rostetter wrote:
> > IMHO, Fedora Legacy was started for RHL, not FC, and the name is shouldn't
> > dictate policy, the original purpose should dictate policy.
>
> Actually no.  Fedora Legacy came from when Fedora was created.  Fedora
> Alternatives and Extras were other proposed projects.  I picked up Legacy
> because I wanted to provide Fedora to my customers, and provide them a
> slightly longer life span.  I was persuaded to do updates for RHL too, which
> I really think was a mistake.
>

I am getting deja-vu from the last time we tried fixing things about 6
months ago. I think the problem isn't RHL updates, Fedora updates etc.

The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release
cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other
people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and
temporary schedule changes that have become permanent.

I just have enough time currently to answer questions for people on
#fedora-legacy, trying to put in 10-20 hours to qa a package because I
don't know how much qa it really takes to ship a fix (especially after
all the negative feedback when we put out a patch that 'broke'
systems).

Most of the other people who have been really interested in the
project have been interested in a certain release (FC1, RHL-7.2, etc)
and once we stopped supporting it, they went away. I really do not
know of anyone new who has wanted to support FC-4 or FC-5 in 4 months.

Maybe the question we should be asking is: Can we do this? We don't
have the number of people that Debian Security has on supporting old
releases.. and because we have fallen so far behind with everything..
can we dig ourselves out.. or do we need to completely reboot the
whole thing (new people, new goals, new name) with the new people
really knowing that

A) we arent going to get much help from 3rd party vendors
B) we arent going to get much help from the community
C) etc

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"