[asterisk-dev] Proposal for DAHDI-trunk: deprecate old kernels

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Oron Peled <oron.peled at xorcom.com> wrote:
> On Friday, 30 בDecember 2011 00:22:16 Tilghman Lesher wrote:
>> So to say that we're dropping support for any particular kernel in
>> DAHDI, given historical norms, really means that people will be caught
>> in an impossible situation: either they will need to become
>> proficient enough to backport bugfixes from newer versions to older
>> branches that still have support for their enterprise kernels, or they
>> will need to upgrade their enterprise systems earlier than expected
>> (and budgeted for).
>
> Agreed.
>
>> The alternative is that we start giving DAHDI release branches more
>> long term support, by creating LTS releases of DAHDI and supporting
>> those kernels for an extended period.
>
> Yes. Since no one here has the same resources RH can put into
> maintaining their RHEL, this seems like the only resonable alternative.

Well, hang on a moment.  Since this does require Digium resources, we
will need their consent on whether or not they choose to support any
particular branch for an extended period.

> * This means we normally have to maintain only a single LTS branch
> to bridge the final life-cycle of the previous RHEL version.

That's not true, though, if the extent of the LTS release is anything
less than the full 7 or 10 years that Red Hat supports their release.
Otherwise, we will have an unsupported LTS release near the end of the
Red Hat release cycle, which again puts IT managers in a very
uncomfortable situation.

> Last, but not least -- can we ring the bell on 2.6.8/9 (RHEL-4)
> immediatly after DAHDI-2.5.x is released, so we can remove it
> by February ? (no, I don't want to see this legacy in DAHDI-2.7)

I think you mean 2.6.  DAHDI 2.5 was released in August.  In any case,
we'd need for that kernel to be deprecated in a full release branch
before we remove it.  So, yes, it would need to remain in 2.7, in
deprecated mode, if it were not already deprecated in 2.6.  And we
would additionally need to declare DAHDI 2.6 to be an LTS release.  If
it were deprecated in 2.6, then 2.5 would need to be the LTS release.

As I noted before, given that Digium maintains the repository and the
packages, this is their decision.  If they choose not to do LTS
releases for DAHDI, then I don't see any reasonable alternative other
than keeping support for 2.6.8 in all versions of DAHDI until after
the sunset date for RHEL-4.

-Tilghman