Pierre-Yves Chibon wrote:
Of course, EPEL vs Fedora comes to mind here, but I wonder: if the
EPEL
maintainer has also commit on the Fedora branches, is it really that much
of a big deal? And vice-versa?
Well, I don't want to get the EPEL bugs assigned to me.
PS2: I am also considering this question having in mind the change
in
branching model the modularity work will bring (ie: branch no longer tied
to a Fedora version but rather to upstream's version)
As I already mentioned in person when this came up in a DevConf talk, I
think that this is a plan that will likely break a lot of things, especially
the expectations all our users rely on (that everything in Everything has a
consistent guaranteed life time), and that doing away with that expectation
is going to make Fedora a lot less useful for many of our users (including
myself and probably also other contributors). Guaranteeing a life time for
the modules included in specific deliverables (spins, "editions", etc.) does
not help, because in the real world, users install many add-on packages from
our repository, its size is one of the main strengths of Fedora.
In fact, this change may even make me look for another distribution, and I
cannot be the only one. I cannot possibly track for each of the hundreds of
packages (not counting texlive-* because they all come from the same SRPM,
otherwise I would write "thousands" rather than "hundreds") that I
have
installed when I have to manually switch to a later major version because
the maintainer arbitrarily decided to discontinue the version that I am
using. Nor do I want major versions automatically dragged in without
warning. The Fedora releases are a great point to put in major changes like
that.
All in all, I think modularity causes more problems than it solves. There
are major practical advantages of having global release branches with a
global lifetime.
Kevin Kofler