User:Pertusus/Draft keeping infra open for EOL

Proposal

• when a release to be kept up goes EOL open all acls to uberpackagers
• keep the buildsystem up
• a new repository is created for packages built after EOL and packages are poushed through bodhi to this repository
• the emphasis is put on stability rather than on innovation

The repository won't be under the fedora umbrella until it has proven to be something worthy for fedora. Currently this is not to be publicized, users are urged to upgrade to the next fedora release and not rely on those updates, this is an experimental setup. Also it is not possible currently to report bug against these packages. Maintainers willing to maintain other people packages in this setting are urged to sign for co-maintainers (at least ask for watchcommit and watchbugzilla). The main aim of this setup is to see if there are really packagers willing to maintain packages a longer time than for 13 months, especially packages central to the distribution that are generally maintained in the distribution by packagers not interested in maintaining their package for a longer time than 13 months.

If accepted, this would be nice to have that running for F8 when it goes EOL as an experiment. If it is too late for F8, F9 could be the target instead.

Avoiding diverting resources from fedora

This proposal does not want to divert resources from other uses in fedora. The idea is to profit from economies of scale and unused capacities (in the build system). Therefore infrastructure and releng teams should have a lot to say and the possibility to block if resources used are considered to be too high, especially if some work has to be done from those teams by people who are not volunteering to help that proposal to happen.

Organization

If this is accepted a SIG would be created to have more discussions and to gauge the interest in that proposal.

Patrice Dumas (pertusus) is volunteering to take the lead, including communicating with the infrastructure, setting up the SIG and searching for volunteers.

Possible follow-up

Possible follow-up, but should not be taken as part of the proposal, only as illustrative. If there happen to be enough people in the SIG and some updates, it may be relevant to mass orphan the EOL branch, including removing co-maintainers, such that interested maintainers can formally sign as maintainers and such that it beecomes possible to see what packages have somebody who cares, and also if packagers are not wanting to maintain too much packages.