best practices for updates in stable releases

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 09.05.2009 19:31, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 18:41 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> What Fedora IMHO needs way more is a written document "best
>> practices for updates in stable releases" that people actually
>> follow.
>> 
>> Right now some packages in Fedora get often updated while others
>> don't. That makes no side happy, as those that prefer to get
>> updates to the latest version will sometimes miss them (e.g. the
>> OpenOffice case discussed here might be such a case) while those
>> that don't want them sometimes can't avoid them (e.g. major kernel
>> updates from 2.6.27 to 2.6.29 that fix security bugs). That sucks.
>> Chose a side and then try to stick to it.
>> 
>> And sure, the decision when to update or not in the end needs to be
>> done by the package maintainers. There always will be special cases
>> where updates/not to update is the better decision even if the
>> guidelines say something else.
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Package_update_guidelines
> we have this.  What we don't seem to have is everybody following it.

Maybe that is

- because the text is to vague

- because lot of packagers don't agree with it and don't care much what
some commitee decided

- because updates of popular packages (like kernel or KDE) give users
and packagers the impression that updating to the latest and greatest is
normal

- because there is no coordination/benevolent Dictator or packager
education to bring people in line

IMHO it's all of the above.

CU
knurd