'outdated' packages in rawhide

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Arkadiusz Miskiewicz wrote:

>> Updating a package to a new version does not come at zero
>> developer time cost.  Depending on the particular package, the
>> changes it includes, and how those changes might affect other
>> packages in the distribution or dependancies need to be
>> investigated closely.  It may also require upgrading other things
>> too that other package owners maintain, which might continue in a
>> domino effect across the distribution depending on the package.
>So what's the status of opening cvs/svn/whatever for people ro + rw for 
>experienced contributors? This works quite well - PLD is for example 
>developed in this style (but in contrast to Fedora there are no people who 
>are paid for working on PLD). 
>
>There are people who have plenty of time and could do such job for free.

I don't know the status of that, however someone else here might 
be able to comment who is actively working on it.


>> You either then ship buggier but newer
>> bits, or downgrade back to the old version and irritate a lot of
>> people due to yum/up2date/apt not liking the package downgrade.
>
>Or perhaps because you don't use Epoch while you should.

Epoch causes it's own problems, and should be avoided at all
costs.  Yes, it does fix these types of situations, but at the
cost of creating permanent Epoch issues.  However this has never
happened with one of my packages while I was maintaining it, so
I've never had a reason to use it anyway.  YMMV


>> It is a gentle balancing game.  That said, I think all of my
>> packages are up to date except for XFree86, but we know the
>> answer there.  ;o)
>License issues?

Yes, among other factors, but I'd rather not get into that as 
it's kindof a waste of time to discuss.  ;o)


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat