Harmless KDE feature upgrades - yeah right

[Peter Jones]

On 03/04/2010 01:49 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 14:57 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Whether it would be a separate backports repo or merely some more
>>> conservativeness in our update stream
>>
>> FWIW, for stuff like KDE, if we don't allow new feature upgrades even in the 
>> current stable release nor support an official backports repo, an unofficial 
>> one will no doubt spring up
> 
> yup, this is very likely. One reason Mandriva's backports repository
> was initiated was because, when MDV allowed only conservative
> updates and had no official facility for adventurous updates, a
> forest of third-party repos offering new versions of things sprung
> up. Obviously this led to confusion for people doing user support 
> ('wait, exactly *whose* KDE 4.3 packages were you running again?') 
> and all> sorts of fun with incompatibilities between the third party
> repos.

Just playing devil's advocate here - what's the virtue of trying to
avoid separate repos? It seems like there's a false dichotomy (trichotomy?)
going on here, where our choices are:

1) this is in the main Fedora(tm) repo
2) we have a special repo for updates vs upgrades, each against stable
3) A free for all of third party repos hosted at various different
   places with huge conflicts and no coöperation whatsoever. Repos
   everywhere, dogs and cats living together, Cain has been marked
   and kicked out of the garden, total chaos.

As a little gedankenexperiment, let's explore for a second a 4th option:
Fedora-blessed/hosted/sponsored/whatever repos for things that we don't
feel should be mandated on users, but which some users may want and some
maintainers want to be able to provide. A little bit of all three -
including a built-in need to be minimalist in construction, so as to
avoid conflict nightmares, but at the same time freedom to say "here's
a new major version of this, since we _know_ that's what you're looking
for if you've got this repo enabled".

Obviously this would require some tools work, but isn't it worth
considering?

-- 
        Peter

Old MacDonald had an agricultural real-estate tax abatement.