Delays in package processing

[Bill Nottingham]

Jesse Keating (jkeating at redhat.com) said: 
> I had hoped that common sense would prevail across our maintainers and
> that stable releases would be treated as such, stable releases not to
> be cheapened with lots of unnecessary updates just so that "users can
> get the latest stuff!".  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be what's
> happening.  I don't want to introduce draconian policies and
> procedures to enforce this, mostly because there just isn't enough time
> in the day to supervise all the potential updates for whether they
> should go out or not.
> 
> So I ask you, Fedora Community, how do we as a community ensure that
> our stable releases stay just that, stable?

Well, it depends. For the stuff I maintain, I tend to follow different
policies depending on the package:

- Library versions do not get upgraded in a stable release
- The more core a package is, it only gets updated with occasional
  severe bugfixes - it is not ever rebased.
- More peripheral things, such as some desktop apps, get updated to
  the latest minor bugfix version

Hard to say how much this works for everyone, though.

Bill