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

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:05:54 -0500, Orcan wrote:
>
>> About rawhide: rawhide could/should contain more experimental stuff,
>> such as beta releases or cvs snapshots of actively and frequently
>> developed software.
>
> Why? And what would be the benefit?
>

For pure developmental purposes.

>> About F-11, F-12, F-13: yeah, pretty much. They should all contain the
>> same stable version of most software.
>
> Cannot agree with this. When F-13 is released, F-12 is history except
> for bug-fixes, security updates, and occasional upgrades that incorporate
> improvements for issues reported for F-12 and older. To bring "most
> software" in F-12 and F-11 in sync with F-13 is beyond the scope of
> creating distribution that is preparing and testing a new release every
> six months. If somebody finds F-(N) to be lacking, there is F-(N+1).
>

I agree that 6 month cycle creates too much work for keeping al
packages up-to-date in all releases. How about a 12 month cycle?

>> (e.g. I don't like not being
>> able to update some of my gtk packages, because the gtk maintainers
>> don't update their package in older releases.)
>
> Where to start and where to stop with upgrade madness?

This is exactly what we should be debating on. How can we draw a
borderline? Example:
- If a library is required by m other packages, it can only be
upgraded once every n months...
- If a soname bump requires a rebuild of more than x packages, it has
to wait until the next Fedora release.
etc

I am completely supporting the idea of banning direct stable repo
pushes. But this is not for discouraging maintainers from sending
updates to stable releases of Fedora. In the contrary, it is to
encourage them to submit all their updates to the testing repo, so
that they can get tested before being pushed to stable. This way the
stable release doesn't fall behind rawhide for more than a couple
weeks. 6 months is a long time to tell a user to wait for an update. I
hope you get my idea: "use testing, and use it extensively for
everything"

Orcan