Evergreen project status update

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!

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3 thoughts on “Evergreen project status update

  1. openSUSE 11.1 will be the first LTS openSUSE desktop release ever, maintained for three years, and you did it. What an outstanding work!
    In my opinion, a LTS release is something that Suse/openSUSE should do regularly.
    You proved that it is possible, even with very limited manpower, i.e. mostly one maintainer (!).
    So it is a huge success.

  2. I fully agree with Peter, I think you did an outstanding job. 11.1 maintenance for 3 years is quite nice for a community distribution indeed!

  3. I am still using openSUSE 11.1 (besides openSUSE 12.1) and, therefore, I am very thankful for what you have done.
    On the mailing-list there was a talk about a meeting with regard to a possible future for openSUSE 11.1 Evergreen.
    Did this meeting happen?
    Maybe it is possible to find a little group of people who has the time to maintain openSUSE 11.1 or parts of it (e.g. the non-GUI ones) also in 2012.
    Libre Office, KDE3, Mozilla products (“your” mozilla OBS repo), Wine and Kernel 2.6.32 still work. 🙂

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