Incompatible Unison update

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 7:14 AM, Stephen Warren
<s-t-rhbugzilla at wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433742
>
>  I assume I'm correct in saying this was the wrong thing to do. What is
>  other people's take on this?

First question... how significant of a problem is the incompatibility.
The bug report doesn't go into details. Are we talking configuration
syntax change? Are we talking data loss?  We have no policy which
demands stagnation.  Obviously some compatibility issues are more
sensitive than others. But to have a dialog about this sort of issue
with any particular maintainer, I'd need more details. But I'm not
inclined to have this discussion over configuration syntax changes.

The next question becomes, why was it updated? If there were major
crasher or security issues that the update fixed, then that will of
course change the dialog.

As a distribution we need to limit the existence of compatibility
packages as much as possible.  Having to ship multiple versions of the
same application, is an extremely poor solution.  If the upstream
project doesn't care about backwards compatibility between versions...
then I'm not inclined that we demand maintainers to do it.  That being
said, breaking things(even config syntax) in an update is never
desirable.  But if the update is desirable for other reasons,
individual maintainers have to determine the balance. Perhaps a clever
maintainer(or a user who works with the maintainer) can find a way to
to deal with the incompatibility issue without introducing a secondary
package.

The third question, would you have been just as upset if the
application version changed between F8 and F9... instead of as an
update?

-jef