A co-worker needed to install some packages on his pc today and ran into the problem that the 42.1 repositories are not there anymore (!?).
We use Leap as it was portrayed as a long term version, similar to ubuntu LTS versions. Reading up today the total maintenance period for 42 would apparently be at max around 36 months? Which is pretty short… and still requiring you to upgrade a number of times (where upgrades are not guaranteed to work or produce stable results!) Without upgrading support is significantly less even? That’s really short for a long term version…
So what is the deal with Leap, is it long term or not? Seems it still has a short life time just as the previous 10/11/12/13 versions, and the only thing that changed is that Tumbleweed is constantly evolving bleeding edge?
We solved the issue now by changing to a mirror that still has 42.1 repos online. But also here, what is the rationale to remove 42.1 so quickly? Even if 42.1 is no longer under active maintenance it is rather inconstructive / obstructive to remove the repositories altogether, considering many might have chosen it as a long term option and may not yet for whatever reason have updated to 42.2 or 42.3.
according to that information Leap is indeed more-or-less a replacement for the older series (perhaps a little longer term), instead of a new (really) long term version. That is a pity.
Unless we have an issue with 42.1 there is for us no real incentive to upgrade. We have development workstations, internal servers, VM’s etc all running Leap with many dependencies. Upgrading is a lot of work and may break stuff (especially since there is no guarantee that upgrades even work 100%) while providing no immediate benefit. So we limit changing our platform as much as possible and don’t want to do it ‘just to have a newer dot version’.
Even then, with the faster lifetime schedule, I still don’t understand the rationale to so quickly remove the repositories. We started using Leap 42.1 when 42.2 was not out yet (still in RC stage so not a viable choice for long term platform at that moment) a little more than a year ago. For those repo’s to be gone already seems overly hasty to me and feels designed to aggressively push people to the newer versions.
We have been using suse since version 6.3 I think, having had 6.4, 7.3, 9.2, 9.3, 10.3 and 12.3 as platforms. For opensuse to provide a real long term version would have been a major step forward.
Hi
Disk space and build targets, unnecessary churn/load on OBS (esp home repositories) more than likely…
So consider rsyncing a mirror (in case that goes too) or run a SMT server so things are local, if you have that many systems, perhaps even look at spacewalk (or SuMA $$).
I use OpenSuse personally, and CentOS at work. If point releases are not LTS, why doesn’t opensuse automatically update you to the next point release like CentOS / Redhat? I just grab the CentOS 6 repos and update, I don’t have to pick CentOS 6.7 or 6.4.
