Bug backlog - now and future. Some proposals.

[Jon Stanley]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 20:41 -0400, Jim Cornette wrote:
>  > In order to advance progress for the releases a short life cycle is
>  > needed to ensure programs do not remain static and outdated.
>
>  I do not agree.  Programs can advance and change, without the OS having
>  to change.  OS and applications are separate things.

Where do you draw the line here?  The kernel, for example gets "lots*
of updates, most of them not for the sake of the fact that we can
update it, but rather that there were bugs that users reported that
were fixed.  Do we not fix bugs that actually exist for the sake of
stability for users that have not experienced them?  I hate to say it,
but RHEL may be the product that you're looking for, where this exact
thing happens.  Between update releases, only critical/security bugs
are fixed.  Anything that's not a showstopper waits til the next
update relasee.

>  I don't agree with this either.  For instance, the people maintaining
>  some applications, such as Evolution, have flatly refused to fix some
>  faults [1] with it in a current release (FC7).  Their answer is you'll
>  have to use the next Fedora release (FC8).  For some people this just
>  isn't practical, whether that simply is the hassles of changing a whole
>  OS to suit one application, or because that release doesn't work for you
>  on the whole.

I can see this, to a point.  Particularly with desktop apps, where the
rate of evolution upstream is so fast as to not allow backporting to
the earliest Fedora release supported (perhaps there were major
API/ABI changes that would break consumers of content from the app,
etc).  I can't really comment on the desktop situation, as I
personally deal more in core OS type stuff.  If Matej is on the list,
he can comment further on the specific desktop situation.

>  That attitude can mean that some software never works.  The current
>  release is always broken, with fixes only being applied to a future
>  version.

This is the state of most FLOSS as far as upstream is concerned.  In
Fedora, we always have the option of upgrading to a new upstream
version, which we can and do exercise freely.