Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
I think it is unnecessary to provide the latest
releases for any releases except the current and
rawhide. If people don't bother to upgrade to the
current release, then they obviously don't care
to run a cutting edge system, so there is no
point in providing it at the expense of a whole
lot of work. It only takes an evening to download
a live cd, install it, and do some rudimentary
configurations. The rest can be achieved as one
actually uses the system, so there is no excuse
for not running the latest release. Considering
that a lot of the work is done by volunteers (or
are you, all you redhat/fedora people?), this is
a fabulous system all for free and not even money
can purchase anything better.
[snip]
Definitely, old releases should receive only the
necessary bug fixes, not new features. This is a
terrible waste of manpower.
It's actually almost no extra work to build the updates also for the
previous stable release. We have to build them for the current stable
anyway. It just means doing the usual routine (copying the specfile,
committing and running make tag and make build BUILD_FLAGS=--nowait) twice
instead of once (and even the commit can be done for both at once by
committing in the parent directory), which takes only a few seconds extra,
the builds run in parallel. Doing the updates for only one Fedora release
would not be a significant saving of time or effort. Actually actively
fixing bugs in the old, no longer supported by upstream branch would
actually be MORE work.
To save man-hours, it might be better to scrap
kde-redhat and just stick to updates and updates-
testing. I would enable updates-testing (and
sometimes I even pull something off koji
manually), but many would stick to the safer
route of just enabling updates.
kde-redhat is also very little work, usually just rebuilding stuff from
Rawhide for the unstable repository, it's basically handled by 1 person (Rex
Dieter) and it has been extremely helpful in helping to get prereleases
tested and thus to prevent some disasters with the update to the actual
release.
Kevin Kofler