best practices for updates in stable releases (was: Re: OpenOffice 3.1)

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Sat May 9 16:41:24 UTC 2009


On 09.05.2009 17:58, Christian Rose wrote:
> On 5/9/09, Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 12:51 +0100, Caolán McNamara wrote:
>>  > Well, in this case updating F-10 3.1 properly would require updating a
>>  > load of other stuff as well with all the risks and work that entails.
>>  > But even if that wasn't the case I generally don't bump major versions
>>  > of OOo in a released product. I see our fedora release cycle as ones of
>>  > iterative stable complete releases, rather than one which has an
>>  > always-open pool of stable packages which always contains the latest
>>  > stable version of a package. i.e. F-10 was history as soon as it was
>>  > released, and F-11 is likewise almost dead to me already :-) Not that I
>>  > won't fix bugs in them, just that I don't see them as live development
>>  > releases.
>> I thank you for this!
> +1
> 
> IMHO, Fedora needs more maintainers who think of whole releases as
> stable release sets.

What Fedora IMHO needs way more is a written document "best practices
for updates in stable releases" that people actually follow.

Right now some packages in Fedora get often updated while others don't.
That makes no side happy, as those that prefer to get updates to the
latest version will sometimes miss them (e.g. the OpenOffice case
discussed here might be such a case) while those that don't want them
sometimes can't avoid them (e.g. major kernel updates from 2.6.27 to
2.6.29 that fix security bugs). That sucks. Chose a side and then try to
stick to it.

And sure, the decision when to update or not in the end needs to be done
by the package maintainers. There always will be special cases where
updates/not to update is the better decision even if the guidelines say
something else.

CU
knurd




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