Incompatible Unison update

[Christopher Aillon]

On 02/21/2008 11:54 AM, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> On 21/02/2008, Stephen Warren <s-t-rhbugzilla at wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
>> The unison package in Fedora 8 was recently updated to an incompatible
>>  version, which breaks (previously working) interoperability of F8 with
>>  other systems that have the older Unison version.
>>
>>  See the details at:
>>
>>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433742
>>
>>  I assume I'm correct in saying this was the wrong thing to do. What is
>>  other people's take on this?
> 
> I don't think it was the wrong thing to do - Fedora is bleeding edge,
> and so incompatibilities will occur. You could argue for a
> compat-esque package though, or better still, submit one.

Fedora is bleeding edge, yes.  However, if every maintainer blindly 
pushed updates without thinking of how it would affect everyone, Fedora 
would simply be bleeding.

I think it's safe to say that we want to keep our users, not break them 
badly enough that they go to other distributions.  It is good to update 
to newer software.  However, doing so without considering the 
ramifications of doing so is bad.  If it will cause many people to 
break, the packager maintainer SHOULD keep that in mind and CONSIDER 
shipping it only in rawhide.