On 2022-11-24 03:13, Michael J Gruber wrote:
> I guess there's (at least) two ways to understand "stable":
>
> - things don't break
> - things don't change
True, but the policy document is explicit about which meaning is
intended, reading, "Updates should aim to fix bugs, and not introduce
features, particularly when those features would materially affect the
user or developer experience"
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Updates_Policy/#stable-releases
It has to do with differing opinions on that and in the first part of the sentence. There is
A) Updates should aim to fix bugs, AND not introduce features.
B) Updates should aim to fix bugs, and not introduce features.
Reason A with a strong logical AND means that things should be backported for any bug fix. In this case, you are probably never going to see any bug fixes occur in the distro as most software projects will say that the bug is only fixed in the latest version which of course added 9 features. Since this is usually a large amount of work for someone who may only have taken the package to keep it in for a dependency, you would then just see those fixes in rawhide (if at all).
Reason B with a weak language 'and' means that you shouldn't do updates just to introduce new features but in order to fix things. This means that if the upstream which in the cases of Firefox, Thunderbird, emacs, GIMP, etc are either a package set they say is LTS OR in the latest.. you are going to see updates occur.
Whenever I have talked to FESCO members over any large change, they have said it was the B form they meant and they were ok with updates if it was the way to fix things.