alpha/beta software in Fedora 8?

Pekka Pietikainen pp at ee.oulu.fi
Wed Nov 28 14:56:25 UTC 2007


On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 03:33:47PM +0100, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> >Well, I'm not sure how it can be considered perfect when it does not
> >begin to address the "alpha/beta" issue that you think is resolvable
> >with packaging policy.
> >
> >FWIW, I agree with Tibbs, since we have no way of determining how stable
> >package releases are without trusting the maintainer.
> 
> I never said that we should resolve the alpha/beta issue.  I said we 
> should have some form of (loose) criteria for maintainers in release 
> branches.  "It must maintain stability" is a good criterion item.  Else, 
> maintainers could just go breaking stuff and say "well, I thought Fedora 
> was supposed to be bleeding edge - nobody told me I couldn't break stuff 
> in a release".
> 
> It also serves as a great fallback policy in the unlikely case we 
> (FESCo? RelEng?) ever find ourselves in the case where we need to decide 
> to (nudge the maintainer to) revert a change because it breaks too many 
> people.
It would appear there is a lack of "Why is this version being shipped"
documentation as well. If it's a Major Feature (like KDE4) it'll get tracked
and discussed, but otherwise if there's a good reason for shipping something
older (e.g. newest version introduces dependency hell) or newer (CVS snapshot
fixes critical issues) than the latest "stable" there's often no way of
figuring out other than asking the maintainer, who usually will have a good
answer.

Maybe have something like this in pkgdb?

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen




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