On Fri, Nov 09, 2007, Sylvain Pasche wrote:
> We are considering OpenPKG for its distribution and platform portability
> in projects involving Apache/PHP/Mapserver/PostGIS. These projects
> should be used in production, so we are looking for stability in
> available versions.
>
> Quoting a message from the mailing list in 2006-11 [1]:
>
> "CURRENT is about absolute bleeding edge development and an ultra fast
> moving target, including making fully incompatible changes which break
> really everything for everyone at any time."
>
> Which means that we should select a stable branch for our projects
> instead of CURRENT. However, they seem to have been discontinued,
> according to a message posted on 2007-08 [2]:
>
> "You might have searched for what was previously available from the
> openpkg.org FTP service. All but CURRENT has gone due to lack of
> monetary and manpower sponsorship."
Unfortunately, currently we really can only provide OpenPKG Community
CURRENT, as not enough manpower was available to continue the free
OpenPKG Community 2-STABLE series and the commercial OpenPKG Enterprise
E1.0 distribution (which now even has gone end-of-life recently) was not
able to financially compensate its large expenses and hence is currently
not planned to be continued with a E2.0 distribution, too.
The resources of the OpenPKG Foundation e.V. and the OpenPKG GmbH are
rather limited and we currently really cannot afford providing more than
one distribution variant as long as the community and the industry is
not willing to financially compensate those *fairly*. But experience
over the last 2 years clearly showed that mostly all OpenPKG users are
more willing to locally maintain a personal and individual OpenPKG-based
stable distribution *theirself* than to pay someone else for providing a
standardized stable OpenPKG distribution series. This might look strange
and is perhaps partly unreasonable from a bare financial point of view,
but definitely is reality today...
> Can you give some clarification about what options are available (free
> or not) for someone who is looking for a not so fast moving target using
> OpenPKG, which could be used in production?
As of Q4/2007 you have only two options:
1. maintain a _personal_ OpenPKG distribution yourself by making a
snapshot of CURRENT and then selectively update its packages in case
of bugfixes and security fixes provided by newer CURRENT packages.
The costs greatly depend on your already existing local knowledge
about Open Source software and OpenPKG.
2. contact the OpenPKG GmbH to maintain such a _personal_ OpenPKG
distribution (as described under point 1) for you. That's what other
business users in your situation currently do. The costs depend on
the size and complexity of your personal OpenPKG distribution and the
wished update frequency.
As the previously available options (the free 2-STABLE and the
commercial E1.0) were both financially broken and the currently still
available above two options might be considered too unbalanced (they
are more or less extremes) we are already preparing to take action for
Q1/2008. The idea primarily is to finally change the OpenPKG world from
the ground up. I do not wish to give more details at this time, but I
can guaranty at least that there will be a reasonable technical upgrade
path from todays OpenPKG CURRENT offering.
Ralf S. Engelschall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.engelschall.com
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