[lsb-discuss] Reducing set of distributions in AppChecker and Navigator

[Craig.Scott at csiro.au]

On 12/01/2012, at 2:44 AM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

> On 01/11/2012 08:15 AM, Denis Silakov wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> While preparing community data update, the following thought have come
>> to our minds - would it make sense to drop some distribution entries
>> that may look superfluous for users?
>> 
>> For example, currently we have RHEL 4, 4.1, 4.2, ... 4.8. But do we
>> really want all of them? I'd say that for LSB development we don't need
>> the whole history of every RHEL series , but I am not sure about
>> AppChecker users.
>> 
>> The suggestion is to store only the very first and the very last
>> versions for sequences of updates. That is, for RHEL 4.x we'll have RHEL
>> 4 and RHEL 4.8; for Debian 6.0 - probably 6.0.0 and 6.0.3 and so on.
>> 
>> Does this sound reasonable? Do SUSE guys agree if we drop SLES 10 SP1
>> and SLES 10 SP2, leaving only SLES 10 itself and SLES 10 SP3? :)
> 
> I think we should drop everything that has no "support". Thus for SLES 
> there should only be SLES 10 SP4 and SLES 11 SP1 at the moment. Similar 
> conditions should apply to RHEL, although I am not familiar with their 
> support model.
> 
> For community distros the same rules should apply. At some point 
> community distros no longer provide security and other updates, when 
> this point is reached those distros should be dropped from the app checker.


I'd prefer Denis' original suggestion where the first and last of the series are kept. The first in a series is special from a binary compat point of view, since some people might build against that to ensure their binaries work for all subsequent updates within that series. While for LSB this isn't particularly interesting, it might be for people mixing LSB and non-LSB toolkits and packages.


--
Dr Craig Scott
Computational Software Engineering Team Leader, CSIRO (CMIS)
Melbourne, Australia