'outdated' packages in rawhide

[Jeremy Katz]

Package update balancing is a tricky thing.  On the one hand, with
Fedora we want to be able to track upstream development as closely as
possible.  On the other, we don't want to endanger stability too much
while doing so (or should I say robustness).  No, this isn't RHEL, but I
still think that stability is a concern... nobody wants to run an
unstable, buggy piece of crap ;)   Yes, some updates improve stability.
Others don't.  That's why each has to be carefully considered in and of
itself and not just blanket saying "this is outdated"

So for the ones of these that are mine or I can convincingly say
something about.

On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 01:32 +0100, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> package        latest   rawhide
> -------     --------- ---------
> abiword         2.0.5     2.0.3

Will get updated when I get a tiny bit of spare time.  abiword updates
are generally safe, but unfortunately, they also generally have one
little niggle on some architecture at random or not liking the compiler.

> glade           2.0.1       2.0

This got updated yesterday I believe.

> lftp           2.6.12    2.6.10

Also got updated yesterday.

> lilo           22.5.8    21.4.4

Perfect example of a "bad" package to update.  Our lilo package is
heavily patched.  Updating those patches to a new _major_ version of
lilo is extremely non-trivial.  Not to mention that lilo is a deprecated
package, so spending the time on updating it is a dead-end.  It's right
now only included for those cases where people "have to" have it -- if
we update, it could break the reason those people have to use lilo.  So
this one isn't going to get updated.  The next update it's going to get
is being dropped from the tree again :)

> linux           2.6.4     2.6.3

There's a little bit of lag here as it's nice to have the kernel
somewhat frozen a little bit before the rest of the OS for a test
release.  Otherwise, the last minute scrambling can get ugly.  Arjan is
continuing to track this, it's just not getting built where it shows up
in rawhide.

> lvm             1.0.8     1.0.3

Deprecated with 2.6 (you use lvm2 now) so updating this does nothing
other than take time that could be spent fixing lvm2 bugs :)

> modutils       2.4.27    2.4.26

Also deprecated with 2.6, although module-init-tools is included in the
package

> openssl        0.9.7c    0.9.7a

The openssl people don't really care much about ABI compatibility until
openssl 1.0.  Updating requires a careful audit for ABI breakages and
bumping of the soname if so (which also isn't done upstream).  And then
a rebuild of everything using openssl.  It's generally a significant
amount of pain, so restricting how often its done to big useful updates
is fairly reasonable.  Also, it helps to keep third-party
packages/programs working without a rebuild for every release.

> parted          1.6.6     1.6.3

I actually updated this yesterday, but it also has the "significant
large change from upstream makes updating difficult".   There are also
some lingering historical reasons that made things difficult... these
should be a little bit better now.

> XFree86         4.4.0     4.3.0

Mike already said about this :)

Jeremy