David Malcolm wrote:
I think that a distinction can be made between core packages that
many
different components depend upon versus "leaf" packages that do their
own thing and no other component relies on. I do think we should be
conservative when updating core components in released versions of
Fedora; with rawhide much less so. But perhaps "leaf" packages can have
a less conservative policy.
Well, a backwards-compatible update to a core library isn't normally a
problem. Of course it doesn't make sense to push a soname bump of something
like Boost to a stable release. An update of something guaranteeing
backwards binary compatibility, e.g. Qt or KDE, on the other hand, is quite
safe to push, after adequate testing. And "leaf" also needs to be qualified,
a library that's used by only a small number of applications can be updated
to a binary-incompatible version in a grouped update with the affected
applications: for example, this has often been done to add new hardware
support to libmtp and a few other such libraries, and those updates have
been very nice for the people with the affected hardware and didn't cause
any trouble for anyone else.
Kevin Kofler