Harmless KDE feature upgrades - yeah right

[Kevin Kofler]

Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> I think it is unnecessary to provide the latest
> releases for any releases except the current and
> rawhide. If people don't bother to upgrade to the
> current release, then they obviously don't care
> to run a cutting edge system, so there is no
> point in providing it at the expense of a whole
> lot of work. It only takes an evening to download
> a live cd, install it, and do some rudimentary
> configurations. The rest can be achieved as one
> actually uses the system, so there is no excuse
> for not running the latest release. Considering
> that a lot of the work is done by volunteers (or
> are you, all you redhat/fedora people?), this is
> a fabulous system all for free and not even money
> can purchase anything better.
[snip]
> Definitely, old releases should receive only the
> necessary bug fixes, not new features. This is a
> terrible waste of manpower.

It's actually almost no extra work to build the updates also for the 
previous stable release. We have to build them for the current stable 
anyway. It just means doing the usual routine (copying the specfile, 
committing and running make tag and make build BUILD_FLAGS=--nowait) twice 
instead of once (and even the commit can be done for both at once by 
committing in the parent directory), which takes only a few seconds extra, 
the builds run in parallel. Doing the updates for only one Fedora release 
would not be a significant saving of time or effort. Actually actively 
fixing bugs in the old, no longer supported by upstream branch would 
actually be MORE work.

> To save man-hours, it might be better to scrap
> kde-redhat and just stick to updates and updates-
> testing. I would enable updates-testing (and
> sometimes I even pull something off koji
> manually), but many would stick to the safer
> route of just enabling updates.

kde-redhat is also very little work, usually just rebuilding stuff from 
Rawhide for the unstable repository, it's basically handled by 1 person (Rex 
Dieter) and it has been extremely helpful in helping to get prereleases 
tested and thus to prevent some disasters with the update to the actual 
release.

        Kevin Kofler