I wrote:
Adam Williamson wrote:
> How do you expect to be able to maintain an entire desktop environment
> on a distribution you don't even have installed? I have some sympathy
> for the 'fifty people said it works on F14, it probably works on F12
> too' argument, but for a *small, leaf* package, not for an entire
> desktop environment! If I were a KDE user running F12 I'd feel very
> unsafe knowing someone was happily pushing updates of the entire
> environment who did not even have a running F12 machine.
I've sometimes actually done testing on older releases out of sheer
laziness to upgrade to a newer one (see also me testing that F13 KDE 4.5.3
upgrade), but with all this bullying of "Want current software? Upgrade
your Fedora!", with previous supported releases getting only second-class
upgrade support, that's going to stop soon (in fact, I'll probably upgrade
my machines to F14 before the end of the month). (Pretty much everyone
else in KDE SIG always runs the latest Fedora. I'm almost the only one
left on F13.) So by limiting the kind of support previous releases get,
you're actually INCREASING the risk of untested updates, by making it
unattractive for your developers to run those releases.
PS: In addition, more aggressive package upgrading on stable releases would
also reduce the amount of gratuitous differences between the releases,
making it less likely for stuff to work on Fedora n and break on n-1.
In short: Want higher-quality updates for previous releases? Then push
version upgrades wherever possible (even and especially for libraries, as
long as they're ABI-compatible or can be group-pushed with a small set of
rebuilt reverse dependencies)!
Kevin Kofler