Any involvement in EVERGREEN (long term openSUSE support) project ?

oldcpu · December 21, 2010, 8:36pm

The possibility of a new longer term openSUSE version is being considered, called “EVERGREEN” (assuming that I have this correct).

I note this mailing list: Evergreen Info Page

I note this message that I received shortly after I subscribed to the mailing list:

Evergreen is the openSUSE project for a Long Term Support distribution.

It’s aimed at the small/personal server administrators who can’t afford or don’t need the hight level the SLED Novell support provide.

It’s a new project, still in preliminary phase. As test bed, the Evergreen project choosed to work on the soon to be no more openSUSE maintained openSUSE 11.1.

Evergreen seeks for volunteers to maintain server packages or test the patches. His communication channel is the evergreen mailing list (at present time evergreen@lists.rosenauer.org). Do NOT use this service on a critical production server!

jdd

(by the way, I dislike mailing lists, but sometimes on openSUSE it appears to be one of the better ways to find out better as to what is happening).

Has anyone else been tracking this ?

nlsthzn · December 21, 2010, 8:52pm

This sounds interesting… it should fill a niche market, that should make an “upgrade” to SLED the natural choice later if needed…

pistazienfresser · December 22, 2010, 8:59pm

I have not tracked/read all.

But I could add some links:

For tracing (and maybe discussing, too)
in the mailing-list (archive = lists.opensuse.org) under/to
openSUSE LTS
…/opensuse-project/2010-11/msg00223.html](http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2010-11/msg00223.html) and
…/opensuse-project/2010-12/msg00004.html](http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2010-12/msg00004.html)

For voting (and discussing/presenting) on/to
openFATE #310963
Make openSUSE releases with more life time than 18 months.
https://features.opensuse.org/310963

Regards
Martin

robin_listas · December 22, 2010, 9:33pm

On 2010-12-21 21:06, oldcpu wrote:

> Has anyone else been tracking this ?

I knew about the idea, but as I’m not using 11.1 I haven’t tracked the
project. So they managed to go ahead? Good

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

oldcpu · December 22, 2010, 10:06pm

Its not clear to me how far ahead they have got. I read talk of using 11.1 as an initial trial, but its not clear to me how many are to be involved in the trial, nor what sort of support packages will be available for it. NorNor if packages will be restricted to servers, nor if it even be expanded to desktops/GUIs.

Some of the posts I read suggested that they would only start off with server packages, and only after that appeared doable, would they move on to desktops. From that I suspect we won’t see packman packager support, which tends to be more desktop based than server based support. But thats a suspicion, or rather a speculation based on my having no real knowledge as to how this is poceeding.

robin_listas · December 23, 2010, 3:20pm

On 2010-12-22 22:36, oldcpu wrote:
>
> Some of the posts I read suggested that they would only start off with
> server packages, and only after that appeared doable, would they move on
> to desktops.

Seems sensible.

> From that I suspect we won’t see packman packager
> support, which tends to be more desktop based than server based support.
> But thats a suspicion, or rather a speculation based on my having no
> real knowledge as to how this is poceeding.

They can’t have packman things if they use the buildservice.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

ah7013 · December 25, 2010, 12:44pm

This seems interesting, I like the idea of an openSUSE LTS version

robin_listas · December 25, 2010, 2:03pm

On 2010-12-25 13:06, ah7013 wrote:
>
> This seems interesting, I like the idea of an openSUSE LTS version

Personally, I would prefer openSUSE to go back to the two year support
cycle. Lacking that, LTS is something.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

oldcpu · January 12, 2011, 10:01am

This is just a post to tie up some loose ends. … There is some discussion on our forum about evergreen here: A free LTS version of openSUSE would top my Linux wish list.

The place for discussion of Evergreen is noted in the 1st post to this thread (which is on the Evergreen mailing list). Reference the backup of repositories, I believe the following has been implemented for now (subject to change as the Evergreen project matures) :

OSS for 11.1 here:

http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/

and non-oss for 11.1 here:

http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/11.1/repo/non-oss/

and update here (as of the discontinuation):

http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/update/11.1/

and source for oss here:

http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/source/distribution/11.1/repo/oss/

and source for non-oss here:

http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/source/distribution/11.1/repo/non-oss/

Typically a regular user (not a developer) does not need the source code. My understanding (to be corrected if I am wrong) is the ‘debug’ repos will not be continued.

Extra effort is being made to store the final openSUSE-11.1 configuration at the time of discontinuation, in order to support the Evergreen project, which has selected openSUSE-11.1 for its testing.

robin_listas · January 12, 2011, 4:08pm

On 2011-01-12 10:06, oldcpu wrote:
> Typically a regular user (not a developer) does not need the source
> code. My understanding (to be corrected if I am wrong) is the ‘debug’
> repos will not be continued.

Right. They take a lot of space, so it is better not to ask the people
providing resources for that lot

The source is needed because without it the /devs/ can not apply patches at
all, the /distro/ dies.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

djh-novell · January 12, 2011, 5:32pm

Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2011-01-12 10:06, oldcpu wrote:
>> Typically a regular user (not a developer) does not need the source
>> code. My understanding (to be corrected if I am wrong) is the ‘debug’
>> repos will not be continued.
>
> Right. They take a lot of space, so it is better not to ask the people
> providing resources for that lot
>
> The source is needed because without it the /devs/ can not apply patches at
> all, the /distro/ dies.

The source is needed to avoid violating the GPL!

oldcpu · January 16, 2011, 8:30am

Here is the mailing list announcement:

wolfgang.rosenauer at opensuse.org:

Betreff: [security-announce] openSUSE 11.1 has reached end of Novell support - 11.1 Evergreen goes on
Datum: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:43:28 +0100
Von: Marcus Meissner <meissner at suse.de>
Organisation: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg)
An: opensuse-security-announce@opensuse.org

Hi,

With the release of an opensc security fix on Thursday 13th January Novell has released the last update for openSUSE 11.1.

openSUSE 11.1 is now officially discontinued and out of support by Novell.

However, a community effort has been started to continue 11.1 maintenance under the codename of “Evergreen”.

The overview page of this project, how to activate and use it, and other details, is on:
openSUSE:Evergreen - openSUSE
The Evergreen project is lead by openSUSE community member Wolfgang Rosenauer.

Here are some statistics:

openSUSE 11.1 was released on December 18th 2008, making it 2 years and 1 month of security and bugfix support.

Some statistics on the released patches (compared to 11.0):
**Total updates:**		707	(+63)
	Security:	467	(-18)
	Recommended:	236	(+79)
	Optional:	4	(+ 2)

	CVE Entries:	1175 	(+34)
There is a 4% decrease in the number of security updates compared to openSUSE 11.0. There is however a 2% increase in CVE numbers fixed.
**Top issues (compared to 11.0 for issues down to 5):**
     19 MozillaFirefox		(+1)
     14 kernel			(+5)
     11 acroread		(+1)
     10 java-1_6_0-openjdk	(+5)
      9 wireshark		(+1)
      9 opera			(-3)
      9 libopenssl-devel	(+4)
      9 flash-player		(+2)
      8 seamonkey		(-1)
      8 MozillaThunderbird	(-1)
      7 java-1_6_0-sun		(0)
      7 clamav			(+3)
      7 apache2-mod_php5	(0)
      6 moodle			(-1)
      6 libpng-devel		(0)
      6 samba			(0)
      5 postgresql
      5 krb5
      5 java-1_5_0-sun		(-1)
      5 cups			(-2)
And top issues sorted by CVE (Common Vulnerability Enumeration) count (down to 5) (compared to 11.0 for the top):
	163	MozillaFirefox		(+20)
	115	acroread		(+22)
	114	java-1_6_0-sun		(+12)
	83	seamonkey		(0)
	83	kernel			(+8)
	83	java-1_6_0-openjdk	(+33)
	82	flash-player		(+18)
	70	MozillaThunderbird	(+16)
	51	java-1_5_0-sun		(-12, EOLed during the lifetime)
	41	mozilla-xulrunner191
	38	php5			(+14)
	33	wireshark		(-2)
	28	mozilla-xulrunner190	(-12, EOLed during the lifetime)
	28	moodle			(+1)
	27	opera			(-4)
	21	xpdf			(-2)
	17	freetype2
	15	mysql			(+2)
	14	openssl			(+5)
	14	pidgin/finch		(-4)
	13	libpoppler4		(+-0 to libpoppler3)
	13	kdegraphics3		(+2)
	12	krb5			(+4)
	12	samba			(+-0)
	11	postgresql		(+1)
	11	ghostscript		(+-0)
	10	tomcat6			(-1)
	10	MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE
	10	firefox35upgrade
	10	clamav			(-7)
	8	ruby			(-9)
	8	mozilla-xulrunner181	(-28, EOLed during the lifetime)
	8	poppler
	8	cups			(-6)
	7	OpenOffice_org
	7	kvm			(0)
	7	gvim			(0)
	7	apache2			(-4)
	6	qemu			(0)
	6	libpng			(0)
	6	glibc
	5	strongswan		(-2)
	5	squid			(0)
	5	bind			(-2)
# security updates by count
# grep -l type..secur updateinfo-*|sed -e
's/^updateinfo-//;s/-[0-9]*.xml$//;'|sort|uniq -c|sort -n +0 -r|less
# grep CVE- update* |perl -e '%cves=();while (<>) { while
(/(CVE-2...-....)/) { $cve{$1}++; s/CVE-2...-....//;} } print
join("
",sort keys %cve)."
";' | wc -l
# for i in updateinfo-* ; do echo -n "$i " ; grep CVE- $i|perl -e
'%cves=();while (<>) { while (/(CVE-2...-....)/) { $cve{$1}++;
s/CVE-2...-....//;} } print join("
",sort keys %cve)."
";' | wc -l ;
done |perl -e 'while (<>) { /^updateinfo-(\S*)-\d*.xml (\d*)$/;
$cnt{$1}+=$2; } ; foreach (sort { $cnt{$b} <=> $cnt{$a} } keys %cnt) {
print "$cnt{$_}		$_
";} '

oldcpu · January 20, 2011, 8:12am

I noted the following on the Evergreen mailing list about a new wiki page for Evergreen containing a list of the changes :