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

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 08:05:28AM +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
> 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...
> 
While I agree with the sentiment that we should try not to break ABI; I do
have to repeat -- Fedora does not require maintaines to backport fixes.
That means that Fedora will break ABI in a release if there is a good
reason to include the new upstream version.  (security fix, bugfix that is
deemed worthy, probably not simply for a new feature... but features may
be the reason an ABI breaks when we pull in a new upstream release to fix
a bug and the release includes it.)

If you really find this  unacceptable, there's two options:

A) Fedora requires backports for problems that break ABI.  Note that this
also means that Fedora may need to have people who create non-upstreamable
patches to software since some upstream fixes may require ABI changes and
we'd need to fix those a different way.

B) You use a different distribution.

-Toshio
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