Beta packages within stable releases

[Jon Stanley]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 12:20 PM, John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:

> What are the views of other members of FESCo or the board?

In EPEL, we (finally) have something of a policy on this. This is
because EL users expect that there systems will Just Work(TM) after an
update.

At the same time, we realize that:

1) We are not paid by RHT to backport impossible patches to old
versions of software
2) There will be security issues where there is no upstream patch, and
backporting the fix from upstream would be difficult/impossible.
3) In any situation *other* than a security fix, breaking the user
experience is to be avoided at all costs.
4) People will want the newest bling available :) - which goal is
incompatible with 3.

Therefore, we've come up with a compromise.  I'm not sure that this
would be applicable to Fedora as a whole, but we've had some good
discussions in EPEL and it's a start.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL_incompatible_upgrades_policy