On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 16:01 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
So in the meeting today we've discussed what to do about our
package
management. At present FC3 will be EOL'd in april(ish). At that time
many of the packages we use in our environment will become out of
date.
FC3 packages are already out of date, only FC5 and devel are
consistently at close to the latest versions right now. When it goes
EOL, they will start to have unfixed security holes as well as simply
lagging relative to upstream version.
So options are an upgrade to RHEL5 when it is released (which
we aren't even done upgrading everything to RHEL4 yet), building and
supporting our own repo, or try to foster support for
centos.karan.org
or
https://extras.108.redhat.com/
To some extent we are going to have to figure out how to keep packages
updated separate from Fedora Extras unless we migrate to Fedora Core on
the servers instead of RHEL. We are going to want the latest versions
of some packages and they won't be available in the relevant FE release.
It would be nice to be able to share resources and manpower with some
other group, though. Currently,
centos.karan.org and Extras have
packages and infrastructure to provide updated packages. But there
needs to be manpower (and possibly policy) to allow this.
If we stayed within the Fedora Extras realm, I think we could continue
to use the existing infrastructure (VCS, buildsystem, lookaside cache,
etc) but we'd need to have separate targets RHELX or Infrastructure
that branched from the packages in the Extras tree. Otherwise we'll
conflict with Extras policies surrounding Legacy branches.
We need to hear more from z00dax and quaid to evaluate what policies,
manpower, or infrastructure limitations would exist to maintaining
packages within the
centos.karan.org or extra.108 space.
-Toshio
Note: I don't think it would be technically difficult to do this within
Extras infrastructure and the planned additions to that infrastructure
(package database, distributed vcs) should make this even easier.