On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 17:13:41 -0500, Gavin Engel gavin@engel.com wrote:
I understand how auto upgrading from 1.0.1 to 2.0.1 can cause a lot of confusion, so I suppose packages should be defaulted to "minor" updates each time yum update is run. In other words, automatically updating from 1.0 to 1.x. Then again, I'm comfortable setting most of my packages (perhaps not libraries) to auto update "major", meaning version 1.x to 2.x. I see no reason why the choice couldn't be left to the end user. Maybe all that is needed is a bash script that runs yum update on a rawhide installation, and accepts major version updates if the package is set to allow "major" version updates. Would that make any sense?
That won't work. For leaf packages, sometimes people will make newer releases available various places. Things get much more difficult with packages that other things depend on.
If there are just a few packages you really want up to date, you might trying doing your own builds of those. For example you might run mostly Fedora 20, but rebuild a few Rawhide (Fedora 21) source rpms for packages you want more up to date than are in Fedora 20. For a lot of packages this will work fairly easily most of the time.
I would like to help the Fedora team where I can. My second question here is, how would I help make rawhide less risky? Do I just send bug reports to the rawhide mailing list?
The biggest thing would be to run rawhide on some machine you use regularly and provode feedback. Bug reports should be filed against bugzilla. Though sometimes you might ask questions on the mailing list to help fill out the bug report.