Dear Herbert,
> I've been maintaining Linux-VServer for more than 12 years
> now and no worries, I'm not done with it yet.
First of all, thank you very much for all the work you have done so far
and the work you will hopefully do in the future on Liux-Vserver. This
is such a great project, we are happy users in production mode for about
5 years now and fully appreciate all the effort that goes into providing
almost always stable patches for recent LTS kernels.
I did not witness the situation you are talking about, so I cannot
really comment on the issue. It sounds like somebody missunderstood how
open source works. I am not sure making a maintainer angry is a good way
to get anywhere, thus I salute you for delivering in spite.
I remember we had a small chat in IRC about which kernels should be
supported last year. At that time, Greg just decided to make 3.10 the
LTS release and a patch for 3.10 was still missing (you managed to get
it done 1 or 2 days after or so) and I felt you also liked the idea to
focus more on LTS releases. Maybe it is time to think about focus again.
For anybody using Linux-Vserver in production mode, it is highly
unlikely that they want (!) or would need the latest mainline kernel. No
sane sysadmin upgrades to latest mainline every release. To maintain
latest mainline, you also need a lot of resources (e.g. free time,
testing maschines etc.) since they do change major parts of the needed
subsystems very often. So by always providing patches for current
mainline, you only support a small minority which probably doesnt use
the kernel in production mode anyway.
Quite the opposite goes for LTS kernels. These only get bugfixes so they
are almost hassle-free for most sysadmins to work with. I believe many
who use Linux-Vserver use LTS versions. And from your perspective,
keeping the patches working should also be a lot less effort. So by
focusing on LTS, you provide support for the majority of users, while
keeping your workload to a minimum.
So, I suggest to put up some info on the wiki that from now on, you
follow LTS lines and adopt supporting current mainline. That way nobody
takes support for current mainline granted. And you could still work on
it to keep up with changes, and as soon as there is a next LTS candidate
in sight, you could then release a new LTS very soon after. All that,
without the hassle nor the pressure to provide a tested "stable" patch
for every major and minor mainline release.
I'd like to hear your thoughts, and also what the community thinks about
this.
Once again, thank you and keep up the good work. I'm sure there really
are many like us who still feel high appreciation. It would make us very
sad if you discontinued the work.
Best
Florian
Received on Sat Feb 1 08:56:01 2014