LTS for Mageia?

[Trio3b]

I am aware of the release cycle , but is there any news on a long term support release for Mageia besides here --> http://blog.mageia.org/en/2011/07/17/ma ... -planning/

From a business perspective we can no longer deal with distros that utilise rolling release model that compromise important production installations. 18 months is tolerable but not ideal. 3 years between installations sounds ancient to most people, but from a business perspective is the least intrusive to workflow while keeping reasonably up to date.
Older distros such as CentOS while stable, have packages that are ancient.

Thanks

[jkerr82508]

The situation has not changed. An LTS release would only be possible if there were a significant increase in the number of volunteers working on the distro, especially in the QA team. It would be irresponsible of Mageia to promise long-term support unless we were reasonably certain of being able to provide quality-assured security updates in a timely manner.

It's important to remember that the QA team are responsible for testing not just all updates to the stable release(s) but also all of the iso's (from Alpha through to final) for new releases.

Jim

[doktor5000]

The point is you should know what you need. Either you need longterm stability and no changes and stuff that works.
Then use either Redhat or Suse, offering 10 to 13 years of support per release.

You simply cannot have recent packages and longterm stability.

[aranud87]

Hi,

Just little up, for know if may be Mga 5 come LTS ?
Every Linux Install Party, nobody want no-LTS and business either

I really like and use only Mageia but without LTS many people don't want to keep

thank you and sorry for bad english

[doktor5000]

If there are much more packagers and much more people joining and contributing to QA team, that may be a possibility.
It's all up to you as Mageia users - you define what Mageia will become. If you want LTS, then help achieve it.

[ghmitch]

Actually the SuSE product is not that bad and not that expensive. But as doktor has noted, you can't have your cake and eat it too. SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 is now in beta and should be available within a few months and will no doubt have a very long lifespan. Major updates are done via service packs. In any case, you will have to pay money for serious longterm support simply because it takes more resources to do it that way.

If you want Mageia with long term support, the closest you can get is probably Mandriva Business Server, but that is designed as a server product, not a desktop product,.

[pmithrandir]

Any way for mageia to create a fondation to pay people to do that ?
If company want LTS, they can pay for it I think(access to the repo locked otherwise).

At least an option would be interesting(and could help to start the process and get companies onboard). It's usually easier to ask 200k€ for a licence than 3-4 developer to be allocated.

[doktor5000]

Any way for mageia to create a fondation to pay people to do that ?

Did you contact somebody from https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Commercial_vendors or Mageia council directly and asked for help? What was the outcome?

[pmithrandir]

Hello,

Only hupstream could maybe give us some expertise, and it's not even sure.

I don't really know how to contact the concil, The mailing list maybe ? It's not really something I use often.(I'm a forum guy)

[jkerr82508]

I don't really know how to contact the concil

http://www.mageia.org/en/contact/

Jim

[viking60]

I think that our friend here had specific questions in mind. For that it might be an overkill to join mailing lists that will contain several other issues.
@Doctor5000
The joining speech has become a reflex these days. If he wants an LTS kernel he must join a group and make it happen.
That is fair enough - but when he asks if he can pay someone for it - where should he go? If it is off topic, community wise, then he should be told so.

IMO it would be great if someone needed a solution and paid for it - and got it (from Hupstream? Or other developers?) - after that this package naturally must be made available to the community.
Would that not help to solve the constant capacity problem? The only thing he would do is change the priorities of the packaging.

If you get paid you cannot ride quirky principles and priorities - you have to deliver what is wanted - that is kind of a good market adjustment isn't it?

[jkerr82508]

Mandriva tried the "paid for" extended support option. I seriously doubt that they ever fully recovered the costs of that offer.

I suspect that like me, most of us who donate financially to Mageia would not want the hardware and other facilities purchased with those funds to be used in supporting a speculative commercial enterprise, which is what a "paid for" option would be.

If someone wants to create a commercial derivative of Mageia offering extended support, they are free to do so, using their own money and facilities.

Jim

[pmithrandir]

Hello,

I sent my question to the concil yesterday.
Will see if I get any answer.

I can imagine that mageia is not made for that purpose, but it's hard for companies to go on a system that provide neither support(hupstream doesn't seams to be specialized in mageia) or LTS. We have issues to apply the security patch more than one time evry 2 years, to I can't imagine what it would mean to upgrade from a version to another...

[ghmitch]

I think we ARE talking two different worlds here. Mandriva is in the commercial non-free category now with their enterprise server product, as, of course, are Red Hat, SuSE and Oracle. All of these offer LONG TERM SUPPORT AND CHARGE FOR THAT SUPPORT. It is NOT illegal under the GPL to sell binaries and that is what these companies do. They do not offer any way to download the binaries for these commercial distros with long term support, only the sources. As has been suggested above, while Mageia *might* be able to break into this business, it would be a point of confusion and divisiveness in terms of Mageia's current mission which is really to provide the best community supported distro out there. Anyone wanting an LTS desktop version of Mageia seriously enough to pay for it would do better to contact Mandriva as their commercial LTS server product is, as I understand, based on Mageia, and not Open Mandriva, which is their community supported distro that carries on the Mandriva tradition. The problem, of course, is that the Mandriva company has been so dysfunctional in its long history that one has to hesitate to guess how much longer it is going to be around in addition to the quality of its products being a concern. So my advice remains to go with SuSE if one needs LTS support. Of course, Ubuntu should also be part of that list I suppose as they are actively trying to break into the commercial realm with an LTS server product. I'm not sure whether or not they offer an LTS desktop product. But I have mixed feelings about Mageia getting entangled in this stuff.

[jkerr82508]

The Mandriva extended support option to which I referred, was not their enterprise product but the "Extended maintenance program", which was sold for the 2008.0, 2009.0 and 2010.0 (non-commercial) Desktop releases. It provided an additional 18 months of base system support beyond the standard 18 months.

Most references to it seem to have been expunged from the Mandriva web sites, but it is referred to near the end of this page:
http://www.mandriva.com/en/support/lifecycle/

I can't remember the price that was charged, but my recollection is that, at the time, I considered it to be expensive for what it provided.

Jim

[ghmitch]

And I believe that those were years when Mandriva was losing lots of money and tanking as a business. That is what makes me very skeptical of the viability of Mageia trying to pursue that kind of model. Best to leave the LTS business to the pros. Its another niche, another business. Mageia is very well positioned to continue doing what it is doing. The Mageia product is not perfect of course, but it really is best in class in just about every way that I can imagine. Why change a model that works? On the one side there are cries of "give us LTS!!!" and on the other "please, please, a rolling release!!!". But each of these alternate approaches requires additional resources to implement, resources that are not there. There are other distributors that specialize in LTS products and others that specialize in rolling release products. If one wants such a product, it is available now, no need to pester Mageia for it. (Not attempting to argue your point Jim, just trying to reinforce it since I feel the same way about the issue)

[doktor5000]

Reposting my opinion from another thread, as it's related:

Effectively at the moment we don't have even enough packagers to maintain all the packages we have in our repositories,
nearly 3000 are currently unmaintained -> check the numbers/links in the header of: http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/
That includes also maintaining 2 to 3 distro releases in parallel, and the development branch on top.

So from a user point of view - what would you appreciate more - a ton of packages, which are mostly broken,
filled with bugs like a can of worms and have security issues and stuff like that. Or less packages, which are stable, working and maintained?

[doktor5000]

So from a user point of view - what would you appreciate more - a ton of packages, which are mostly broken,
filled with bugs like a can of worms and have security issues and stuff like that. Or less packages, which are stable, working and maintained?

I can answer that question without even thinking about it. The distribution has to be sustainable. When it comes to sustainability, in my mind, quality trumps expansiveness. That was one of my big beefs with Mandriva for years. Every package under the sun was available, but a slew of them weren't just buggy, they didn't work at all, many of them never worked. So once a package is no longer functional with no man power to fix it, it should be dropped. That sounds pretty harsh, but it is the reality. Perhaps one solution would be to move these unmaintained packages to a separate "unmaintained" repository, but they should be either cut off or separated from the main distribution. I know that a lot of times if a package is not available from Mageia, I can pull it from Fedora and make it work and that would be preferable from having a buggy or non-functional version on a Mageia reposistory. At least it would save the time of filing a useless bug report. And that is another side of the whole equation. Unmaintained packages generate bug reports that just stack up and frustrate the user who wastes their time filing the report AND frustrates the triage people on the Mageia end who have to slog through and respond to these unsolvable complaints. I would actually appreciate more of an effort on the library side to increase the cross compatibility between Fedora and Mageia to allow more use of Fedora packages. It would be nice is some sort of cooperation on that level could happen between the two distros. I only pick on Fedora because I have found it to be closer to Mageia than any other major distro. Anyway, those are my sentiments on the issue.