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

[Peter Jones]

On 03/11/2010 05:47 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 01:52:06PM -0500, Paul Wouters wrote:
>>
>>> That might be harsh for some soname updates.
>>
>> If a user has built an application against a library, it's not
>> especially reasonable to then break that application by bumping a soname
>> in a stable release.
> 
> If the application is in Fedora as all applications eventually ought
> to be, we will take care of rebuilding it.

There are so many things wrong with this premise, it's hard to formulate an
email. The first is that your ideal world scenario here isn't very realistic -
there are, for example, programs which have intentionally been removed from
Fedora, and for good reasons. That doesn't mean nobody has rebuilt them and
wants them to stay working.

It also implies that we're okay shipping updates of whole dep chains for any
bug whatsoever in a stable release. This is a gigantic problem! Many people
have complained about this - it uses much more bandwidth and storage, even with
deltas (in fact, significantly more storage with deltas), and for very little
appreciable benefit.

This is a bad plan.

-- 
        Peter

When in doubt, debug-on-entry the function you least suspect has
anything to do with something.