I recently got an email from Warren Togami, RedHat, who asked if I
considered packing varnish for EPEL. EPEL is "Extra Packages for
Enterprise Linux", a project under the Fedora umbrella. Its target is to
extend RHEL and its derivates, like CentOS, with a set of maintained,
stable packages. I want to consider this, as it will probably extend the
user base, which is a good thing indeed. The packaging policy of EPEL is
on the other hand quite strict, as it follows more or less the policy
for RHEL. This means that fixed version must remain supported in the
lifespan of a major release of RHEL. Security fixes must be backported.
Minor bugfixes (like varnish-1.1.1 -> 1.1.2) are not merged till next
minor RHEL update. ABI and configuration file spec must remain
compatible within all minor updates. Major upgrades (varnish-1.x ->
varnish-2.x) will not be accepted till next major RHEL release, and so
on. A more detailed outline is available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
While such policies are quite usual in the day-to-day production in the
BSD and Linux distribution world, I don't think I can handle them on my
own. EPEL has no own security team, I think. Will the development team
support me on maintaining a "fixed" release of for example varnish-1.1.2
on el4 and el5 for years to come?
Ingvar
considered packing varnish for EPEL. EPEL is "Extra Packages for
Enterprise Linux", a project under the Fedora umbrella. Its target is to
extend RHEL and its derivates, like CentOS, with a set of maintained,
stable packages. I want to consider this, as it will probably extend the
user base, which is a good thing indeed. The packaging policy of EPEL is
on the other hand quite strict, as it follows more or less the policy
for RHEL. This means that fixed version must remain supported in the
lifespan of a major release of RHEL. Security fixes must be backported.
Minor bugfixes (like varnish-1.1.1 -> 1.1.2) are not merged till next
minor RHEL update. ABI and configuration file spec must remain
compatible within all minor updates. Major upgrades (varnish-1.x ->
varnish-2.x) will not be accepted till next major RHEL release, and so
on. A more detailed outline is available at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/GuidelinesAndPolicies
While such policies are quite usual in the day-to-day production in the
BSD and Linux distribution world, I don't think I can handle them on my
own. EPEL has no own security team, I think. Will the development team
support me on maintaining a "fixed" release of for example varnish-1.1.2
on el4 and el5 for years to come?
Ingvar