Some Suggestions (Mirror Space, gaim, ethereal, etc)

[Warren Togami]

Marc Deslauriers wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-07-24 at 09:14 +0300, Pekka Savola wrote:
> 
>>On the other hand, I do believe we don't have resources to create 
>>these backported patches ourselves.  When such are not available, 
>>upgrading the package should be considered.  In particular I note that 
>>we should apply such a policy even more to the FC1 and FC2 packages.
>>
>>So, I think the good rules of thumb are:
>>  1) if there is already QA'd patch backport, use that;
>>  2) if not, consider upgrading the package to a version that:
>>     a) has easier access to already QA'd patches or
>>     b) has been maintained by official FC updates, so
>>        RPM versioning with upgrades (e.g., FC2 -> FC3) doesn't
>>        break.
> 
> 
> I don't agree with this. It's a lot easier to backport a patch than to
> upgrade to a newer version and break a whole bunch of other stuff. (Of
> course, there are exceptions, like gaim, ethereal, etc.).
> 
> Everytime we've updated a version in the past, we've broken a lot more
> than when we've backported a patch.

Yes, this is why I didn't suggest changing Legacy policy for the 
majority of cases, but rather the rare cases like gaim and ethereal 
where nothing else depends on it, or it maintains a forward compatible 
ABI.  It is simply a waste of time to backport patches to these programs 
when they have their weekly security hole when nobody cares about their 
version.

(Note that gaim upgrading is only an option for RH9+.)

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com