Worthless updates

[Jaroslav Reznik]

On Wednesday 03 March 2010 09:40:15 Alexander Kurtakov wrote:
> > On Wednesday 03 March 2010, Jon Masters wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 21:07 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > > > Ok... removing deprecated uses is a questionable at best update, but
> > > > here is the kicker.  The perl in F11 is perl-5.10.0-82.fc11.  So
> > > > these functions aren't actually deprecated in F11.  So... why is
> > > > this update going out?  What possible benefit does the user get from
> > > > this?  Does anybody see this as a reasonable update to publish on
> > > > F11?
> > 
> > My own personal opinion is that stable updates should only fix serious
> > issues, or security problems. Fedora has such a short lifetime as it is,
> > I really can't see the value in pushing features to F11 when it will die
> > soon. I think it's far better to leave the churn in rawhide.
> 
> While I can totally understand the desire to stay close to upstream for the
> latest release (only), I still think that we should not allow updates other
> than bugfix and security to older versions.
> I know that this was discussed many times but still such decision will even
> benefit whoever wants to have a stable release (i.e. from the time we
> release F13 or a month late to sync it with F11 dead, F12 will receive
> only bugfix and security updates thus minimizing the chances for possible
> breaks in it) and whoever wants latest versions should simply use the
> latest released version. 

It's quite similar to our KDE stability proposal [1] - (from F13 released POV) 
F11 eol, F12 stable with security and bugfix updates and F13 current version 
with latest but stable software. You can't force users to use F14 (aka 
rawhide) to be able to use latest versions with features they want.

If users want really stable (as rock) release - they can use F12 - latest 
software is not very old - only half to one year old, it's probably very 
stable. Then F13 is in supported state - gets latest but well tested updates 
until F14 (probably alpha to let some time for possible regressions to be fixed 
until rock time) is released.

This should satisfy most users - both people who wants stable Fedora (F12), 
people who wants latest software (doesn't mean unstable) F13 and brave people 
- developers/testers with F14 and really raw(hide) Fedora with 
untested/unstable software. Then it makes to support more than one released 
release ;-) 

Jaroslav    

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/Stability_Proposal

> Even if someone wants to argue that we will limit
> the experience of older versions users let me remind that there are a
> number or maintainers that do backport work only to the latest release
> version and doing only serious bugfix updates to older versions (e.g I'm
> in this group) . And there are even more aggressive maintainers who never
> put newer versions in older releases.
> 
> Is this idea worth discussing at all?
> 
> Alexander Kurtakov

-- 
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

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