Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 19:22 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 02:18:23PM -0500, Al Dunsmuir wrote:
> > Hello Matthew,
> > > Other distributions manage this without too much trouble, so I don't see
> > > it being a problem to adopt this policy.
> > 1 word: Resources - person power, time, funding, equipment, etc.
> > 
> > Fedora  is  a  free  software  distribution  "staffed"  informally  by
> > volunteers  (except for that minority of folks who may be paid to work
> > on Fedora as their day job).
> > 
> > RHEL  has  the resources to backport.  Centos uses those backpotrs for
> > free,  but does not generate them (unless again the party supporting a
> > component for Centos happens to be upstream in RHEL).
> 
> Debian has historically managed this. I really don't buy the argument 
> that security or other critical fixes are generally difficult to 
> backport.

Well, having had some experience with doing it, I can say it cuts both
ways. I don't code, never have, probably never will. Mostly I managed to
ship good updates for the Mandriva packages I maintained. For security
issues a minimal patch is usually provided as part of the advisory. For
bugfixes, you can *usually* make it work by extracting the specific fix
from the revision control system and applying it to the version of the
software you shipped, maybe with some little trial-and-error munging
occasionally. But sometimes, the fix doesn't apply cleanly or almost
cleanly to the older version of the code, and you have to go and find
someone from upstream - or someone who knows how to code with the time
and inclination to help - to help you sort it out.

So yeah, most of the time it's okay, but sometimes doing this _can_ be a
problem for a non-coding maintainer (and probably it's sometimes a
problem even for a coding maintainer, in rarer cases). And it is
definitely somewhat more effort than just shipping a version bump.
Shipping a version bump takes about three minutes, backporting a patch
can be an hour or two job. Of course, if you're doing your job properly,
*testing* is more lengthy for the version bump. =)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net