Stable Release Updates types proposal (was Re: Fedora Board Meeting Recap 2010-03-11)

[Kevin Kofler]

Chris Adams wrote:
> Developers can't always get what they want.  Just because Fedora updates
> to upstream's release-of-the-day doesn't mean Ubuntu, SuSE, etc. have
> updated (so hopefully upstream is still paying attention to older
> releases).

It is (especially for leaf packages) much more likely they're going to say 
one or more of:
* "screw you, use a sane distro" (and we lose the user),
* "just build our tarball from source" (with the result that the user ends 
up with an unpackaged mess in /usr/local which grows like mold),
* "screw the distro packages, use ours" (and this leads us to the "third-
party package chaos" problem, which is characterized by low-quality 
packages, dependency hell, inter-repository compatibility issues etc.).

> Most reasonable upstreams I have worked with fully understand that not
> everybody is running yesterday's release and will work with you if you
> find a problem with an older release.  If an upstream can't handle that,
> I would say that is the upstream's problem, not Fedora's.

Upstream cannot go back in time and magically fix a bug in an old release. 
The bug is often already fixed in the current release, so the solution is 
for us to package the current release. And no, backporting fixes is often 
not practical.

        Kevin Kofler