I have posted the following to the openSUSE lists a few moments ago:

as you probably know our initial commitment to support 11.4 within
Evergreen was until July 2014.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen

While I was hoping that we can keep 11.4 alive for some time longer this
is currently not possible from what I would call the "core team" which
is Stefan and myself. We are too busy nowadays to be able to scan and
patch every issue we get aware of.

Thanks to you all who contributed to the success of Evergreen/11.4!

The important message is:

   openSUSE 11.4 Evergreen is not actively maintained anymore!

So if you can, we recommend to switch to openSUSE 13.1 as soon as
possible which is still planned to be an Evergreen release.


Some more details below:
The repository already got and will most likely get more updates from
package maintainers who care about 11.4 and/or their packages though.
You noticed that with recent releases of patches for the bash and NSS
issues already, BUT this is _no_ guarantee that every security issue
will be fixed.
We will accept contributions from anyone though and I will try to take
care about "my" packages.

Some numbers from 11.4 Evergreen (as far as I was able to get them easily):

Evergreen lifetime: 21 months
11.4 overall lifetime (incl. Evergreen): 41 months / 3 years 5 months

Evergreen lifetime numbers (w/o official maintenance period):
Released update source packages: 804
Unique touched source packages:  177
rough number of patches (based on incident counter): 320

Let me also quote Marcus' numbers from official maintenance lifetime:

Total updates: 723
	Security:    416
	Recommended: 306
	Optional:      1

Finally got around to find time to write a bit about my attendance of the openSUSE Conference 2012 in Prague.

Overall I found it a quite successful event even when I could think of a few improvements for next time.  I’ve attended quite some talks during the days and also helped recording some of them. But to me the most important thing was to meet and talk to people. Since openSUSE 11.4 is going to go Evergreen very soon there were quite some discussions including two related BOFs and a maintenance hands-on with Marcus from the SUSE Maintenance team as we are planning to use OBS’ maintenance features for the upcoming 11.4.

What I missed was a bit more space to meet and hack a bit. Both venues were a bit short on seats outside of the talks or BOF rooms. But congratulations for a pretty stable wifi network during the conference. I missed it at the hotel though 😉

Apart from that I’ve met some new (to me) people and missed some other community members including some from the board which is a bit unfortunate for the main community event but still there were many good conversations.

Special thanks to Petr from SUSE showing us the city and helping me to find my hotel when I arrived (and everything else) and also the openSUSE travel support program which was sponsoring my travel to the conference.

I’m looking forward to next year’s conference and hope I can attend there as well again.

I guess it’s time for another Evergreen status update.

I cannot tell much about 11.2 (but as far as I can see Stefan does an awesome job in maintaining it) but will share my thoughts about the 11.1 flavour of Evergreen.

When I started that project it was clearly an experiment as I haven’t had an idea how much work it would be and if people would use it or even help with it. Looking back at what we’ve created it finally is more than I expected. Compared to what I announced in the beginning it was almost possible to maintain every part of the distribution and not only server packages. There are things which turned out be quite hard (e.g. kernel) but overall most issues were covered for 11.1. I think what I was able to prove is that it’s possible to somehow maintain a distribution  with very few manpower.

Now as 11.1 is nearing its 3rd birthday on December, 18th and given the fact that it’s getting harder having stuff updated while still being more or less compatible and stable I found that I cannot keep the pace with my limited spare time and without neglecting my other volunteer projects (remember Mozilla’s rapid release cycle?). For that reason I’m announcing that I’ll step back from being the Evergreen/11.1 project leader by end of this year. As of now noone else has stepped up so I need to announce that 11.1 will most likely be unmaintained as of end of this year. This does not affect 11.2 and I’ll also try to keep my packages updated for maintained Evergreen projects in the future. I’ll also stay involved and help out with organizational and administrative stuff where needed.

It’s still possible to step up taking over the 11.1 maintenance but in the end I think 3 years is already a good timeframe for a community distribution.

I hope that I find a bit of time in december to post a (statistical) summary about Evergreen/11.1 to let you know about some details.

Thanks for your support during the last year!

I’ve just noticed that I haven’t written about Evergreen here since the beginning. I actually did post at least one status update on our list but I think it would be good to give some information to a wider audience (hoping that this blog is read by more people).

In general we are in good shape. Up to now we have released around 55 source updates. You can find the list here. So looking back that means that we were able to update almost everything including desktop applications which was not clear in the beginning how that would work out. Also the Packman team decided to support Evergreen by keeping the Essentials repository available. Unfortunately it is not quite usable at the moment since it contains RPM packages signed with keys not supported by the RPM version in 11.1 which means zypper refuses to install those.

Another milestone is that it seems we will also support 11.2 when it runs out of Novell’s maintenance on May 12th, 2011. Another community member agreed to  lead the effort. More details on that to come soon.

But not everything is working perfectly fine though. Besides some rare cases where community members submitted packages to Evergreen/11.1 all the backporting/packaging work up to now was done by myself. At some points in time I was quite on the limit of my time for the project and there is no redundancy if something bad happens to me. We really need more people contributing to Evergreen. That said it would be really nice if maintainers (especially community maintainers) would  prepare updates for 11.1 as well. Obviously there is no obligation in doing so but I somehow think that in some cases they are just missing the fact that Evergreen exists at all.

So if anyone out there has interest in helping maintaining 11.1 and/or 11.2 please contact us through our mailinglist or contact me directly.

Following up on my previous blogpost I would like to give a small update on what happened so far about a longer supported (open)SUSE release.

We had a longer discussion on the mailing list if an openSLES (a’la CentOS) or “openSUSE LTS” would be the better or easier solution. There are pros and cons for both while the required infrastructure differs a lot. I’m not diving into details here though. While I would find a SLES clone appealing I’m not in the position to drive such an effort. I also do not think that having both makes sense and therefore I decided to go on with the other approach for now trying to extend the lifetime of an existing openSUSE release.

People in the community came up with the project name Evergreen and I think that matches what we try to build pretty well. I proposed to give the whole effort a trial with openSUSE 11.1 which went unsupported with the new year. At the moment we still have organizational and technical issues and most likely won’t be able to utilize all the update features (deltarpms, zypp patches) but still we will try to deliver updates from a certain update repository. Because of the holiday season we couldn’t figure out the details yet but hopefully will get it sorted out in time. Stay tuned for further detailed information here and on the mailing lists.

Please note that this effort is in experimental state still and didn’t attract that many contributors yet unfortunately. So at the moment it’s still unclear if we will be able to deliver as we would like to.

If you are interested in this project feel free to join our (current) project list.

Just recently I found again that openSUSE is not really positioned for some usecases. In my personal case that is especially the usage as a web/mail/dns/etc server on hosted environments. IMHO it just doesn’t make sense to roll out a distribution which is supported for only 18 months to a hosted system with limited access to it. I still have been doing that with previous openSUSE releases but it’s so annoying that I really regret it. Also the possibility to zypper dup doesn’t really fix that issue for different reasons. Anyway this post is not about whining about that fact or to explain why I don’t like to update these type of systems remotely every <= 18 months.

A possible solution?

Sometime last year there was a discussion about options for something like an “openSLE” or “openSUSE LTS” distribution. There is an external page where some outcome was documented here. The dicussions stopped mainly because of health issues of the main initiator. There was done some planning and voting on the different options but no real results ever happened (as far as I know). So I’m trying to resurrect that topic a bit once again:

The amount of work related to such a project is the critical part and therefore my proposal is to try to start off with a “lightweight” approach.

This would be something like an openSUSE LTS version. That means that the community would take over (security) maintenance after Novell as main contributor drops it out of official maintenance after around 18 months. This will likely only work for a subset of packages which were delivered with the original distribution but the focus might be on server services anyway. Using the openSUSE release which also is the base for SLE could help us a bit as the work is done anyway (some of the Novell employees who are also openSUSE community members would hopefully help us here?). There are quite some details to work out still but it could be doable.

While I think we wouldn’t need a lot of people we at least need some and the more the better.  We will bring that topic up again on opensuse-project@o.o as well. The main intention of this post is to get feedback if there is enough interest and contributors to do further planning. I’m very interested in hearing from you via comments, mailing lists or personal mail.