some closure on the xorg updates issue

[Kevin Kofler]

Rahul <sundaram <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
> >> In short, it's a major change with only modest benefit, and a better 
> >> solution is coming soon.
> > 
> > And what IS that "better solution"?
> 
> A well defined updates policy with the release engineering team to grant 
> exceptions when required.
> 
> Draft at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UpdatesPolicy

And how is that a solution to the problem that an X.Org update is needed to add 
support for some hardware (Intel) and improve support for others (ATI 
r3xx/r4xx)?

> Major new versions of system libraries, frameworks and desktop environments
> MUST not be provided as updates and only in the subsequent releases.

Sigh, is that really what we want? FC4 got a major KDE upgrade, there was only 
one serious breakage (K3b) which was fixed by a subsequent K3b upgrade, and 
which would most likely have been avoided if the KDE upgrade got through 
updates-testing as the new update policy suggests requiring, and there were 
visible benefits. There were also several user complaints on the fedora-list 
about the lack of a KDE upgrade to 3.5.0 before it was pushed. KDE is 
ABI-backwards-compatible as is most of GNOME, so apart from exposing bugs in 
particular applications (which was what happened with K3b, and which 
updates-testing is there for to catch), there is not much which can go wrong.

Now if course, if "major" means upgrading KDE 3 to KDE 4 (even when KDE 4 gets 
released officially), then I fully agree this doesn't make sense in a released 
version (putting a parallel-installable kde4 into Extras is certainly a better 
solution), but that's not how I read that clause.

        Kevin Kofler