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

[Terry Barnaby]

On 12/03/10 03:42, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Chris Adams wrote:
>> There's a difference between not supporting third-party software (is
>> that actually documented somewhere or another Kevin Kofler rule?) and
>> intentionally breaking it.
>
> There's no policy saying we support it, ergo by default, we don't.
>
> And we don't intentionally break it, we upgrade a library for some good
> reason (there's always a good reason why a soname bump gets pushed) and that
> happens to break some third-party software we don't and can't know about.
> (When we do, e.g. for software in RPM Fusion, we alert the affected
> maintainers so they can rebuild their packages.)
>
> For example, Firefox security updates are impossible to do without ABI
> breaks in xulrunner.
>
>          Kevin Kofler
>
I really strongly disagree that ABI interfaces of the mainly used
shared libraries could be allowed to change in a "stable" release.
We develop internal applications that are packaged and go out to a few
users. We use Fedora primarily as an OS to run applications we need
rather than an experimentation platform.
I consider it unacceptable for a system "update" to break the
ABI for these and any other third-party packages. It would mean failures
in the field that would require live intervention. This is what
rawhide is for.
We would end up by turning off Fedora updating on these systems and in
effect manage the updates of the system ourselves probably from our own
repository (our own Fedora spin) or, probably move to a different system.
I am sure a lot of users, like us, use Fedora for there own purposes and
develop there own applications for it, but do not maintain them in the
main Fedora package tree. There's more to Fedora than just the main Fedora
repository...

Terry