FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Kevin Kofler]

Orion Poplawski wrote:
> I certainly can't see the need for it to appear in F11 (isn't the fact
> that someone hasn't bothered upgrading to F12 indication that they are
> looking for a little stability?).

We're evaluating the option of not doing the updates for the oldstable [1] 
releases. We can see the rationale:
* people who haven't upgraded to the current stable might indeed also not
  want a newer KDE,
* updates for the oldstable release also tend to get much fewer testing,
* people can always upgrade to the current stable release to get the current
  KDE,
* it limits the big KDE upgrades to 1/release instead of 2/release as now,
but it also has drawbacks:
* it means we have to maintain 2 separate KDE sets, or even 3 when we import
  prereleases of the next KDE into Rawhide, instead of the current 1 or 2,
* there's the issue of bugfixes:
  - not all bugfixes are backported to the stable branch upstream, sometimes
    they can't be backported upstream because they require e.g. a new Qt,
    because they add translatable strings or for whatever reason,
  - upstream stops releasing 4.n.x bugfix releases as they release 4.n+1.0,
  => therefore, upgrading to 4.n+1 is the easiest way, and sometimes the
     only practical one, to get those bugfixes. We'd be stuck with either
     bugs no longer getting fixed or us having to massively backport
     bugfixes, which I'm not convinced we have the manpower for (I don't
     think any distro has, really; those distros which don't do upgrades
     backport only select few bugfixes, sometimes only security fixes). The
     question is: is this a price we want to pay? I always feel bad for
     leaving issues unsolved, but of course introducing new issues is also
     not a nice thing to do. ;-)
Personally, I'm not convinced that not upgrading is a good idea (e.g. I used 
F9 until EOL and 4.2 was really great there, then I went to F10 and used 
that until its EOL with 4.3 and that also worked great), but this option IS 
being evaluated in KDE SIG.

[1] Yes, I'm stealing Debian terminology here. ;-)

        Kevin Kofler