Stable Release Updates types proposal

[Kevin Kofler]

Benny Amorsen wrote:
> Just please make sure the policy is announced so that we can act
> sensibly. Especially if the policy is "Gnome libraries won't require
> rebuilds during a release, whereas KDE libraries might".

The current policy (or lack of a formal policy, if you prefer) boils down 
to: "any library might theoretically require rebuilds during a release, 
though in practice this is extremely unlikely to happen for libraries with 
many dependent packages". Of course neither GNOME nor KDE can be upgraded to 
a version which requires rebuilding everything. On the other hand, libraries 
such as kdegraphics' libkipi which only a few apps depend on have indeed 
been bumped. (For KDE, I refer you to upstream's ABI policy, which basically 
says that kdelibs and kdepimlibs are guaranteed to keep backwards binary 
compatibility throughout the whole lifetime of KDE 4, but libraries provided 
by application modules (i.e. all the other modules) are only guaranteed to 
keep backwards binary compatibility within a 4.n series.)

        Kevin Kofler