Re: Updates Politics Proposal

[Philip Molter <philip datafoundry com>]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 23:11 +0200, Igor Nestorović wrote:
>
> > What say you?
>
>
> That leads to releases being upgraded on previous OS releases.  This is
> against the policy of Fedora Legacy, as it is no longer a backport.  We
> need to avoid this as much as possible.

I agree with this statement, but as a FL user, I can say that one of the 
problems with FL is that outstanding bugs never get fixed.  The policy 
of only applying security patches means that outstanding issues for 
which there were open FC bug reports (and even bug reports with trivial 
patches) never get fixed.

To cite a specific example, there is a bug in the e100 driver that 
causes sporadic timeouts.  This bug has been patched with a trivial (2 
or 3 line change) patch in the latest kernel rev.  This patch doesn't 
change functionality or APIs.  It just fixes a thinko.  The patch has 
already made its way into FC3 through the latest kernel release, but FC2 
users are out of luck because of the security-only policy.  This patch 
is no more burdensome than a security patch, yet it's not accepted 
because it's not a security problem.

I'm personally in favor of expanding the patch policy to fix trivial 
bugs in addition to security bugs.  Trivial bug patches can be open to 
discussion, of course ("I'm sorry, but this patch changes too much 
behavior to be accepted"), but they shouldn't be outright denied simply 
because the issue they fix isn't solely security-related.

I think that's where some of Igor's frustration stems from.  I know it's 
a frustration of mine.

Philip