Worthless updates

[Alexander Kurtakov]

> On Wednesday 03 March 2010, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 21:07 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
> > On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > Ok... removing deprecated uses is a questionable at best update, but
> > > here is the kicker.  The perl in F11 is perl-5.10.0-82.fc11.  So these
> > > functions aren't actually deprecated in F11.  So... why is this update
> > > going out?  What possible benefit does the user get from this?  Does
> > > anybody see this as a reasonable update to publish on F11?
> 
> My own personal opinion is that stable updates should only fix serious
> issues, or security problems. Fedora has such a short lifetime as it is,
> I really can't see the value in pushing features to F11 when it will die
> soon. I think it's far better to leave the churn in rawhide.
> 

While I can totally understand the desire to stay close to upstream for the 
latest release (only), I still think that we should not allow updates other 
than bugfix and security to older versions. 
I know that this was discussed many times but still such decision will even 
benefit whoever wants to have a stable release (i.e. from the time we release 
F13 or a month late to sync it with F11 dead, F12 will receive only bugfix and 
security updates thus minimizing the chances for possible breaks in it) and 
whoever wants latest versions should simply use the latest released version.
Even if someone wants to argue that we will limit the experience of older 
versions users let me remind that there are a number or maintainers that do 
backport work only to the latest release version and doing only serious bugfix 
updates to older versions (e.g I'm in this group) . And there are even more 
aggressive maintainers who never put newer versions in older releases.

Is this idea worth discussing at all?

Alexander Kurtakov