Leaving? (cont'd)

[Denis Leroy]

Rex Dieter wrote:
> Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> 
> 
>>Back in FC4 I think it was, a newer vesion of KDE came out
>>approximately halfway though the Fedora life which fixed at least
>>three problems that I (and others I am sure) had which had rendered
>>serveral applications useless. So for half of a Fedora an update was
>>_not_ made as I was told it was a general policy not to do major
>>updates within a realse cycle.
>>
>>Similarly, when MySQL jumped to 4.1 I think it was, Fedora stayed with
>>4.0 for the entire release cycle, for apperently no reason other than
>>the no major update policy.
> 
> 
> This kind of thing is not a general Fedora policy but is rather
> (generally) left to the discretion of the package's maintainer in question.

That's true, and the issue was raised previously that maybe clearer 
guidelines should be written about what should or should not be updated 
within the same Fedora release. FC-5 shouldn't "eat babies" like 
rawhide, yet one expects more than just security updates. So a line must 
be drawn somewhere. For example, if a new version of gnumeric (or 
inkscape, or whatever) is out, with bug fixes and new features, by all 
means it should be released. OTOH, if said new release is not backward 
compatible with older documents (unlikely of course, but this is just an 
example), you obviously don't want to update and potentially break 
someone's documents. I think this is where common sense should come in, 
and certainly inconvenience to the user base is one of many factors that 
should come into the decision...

-denis