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

[Al Dunsmuir]

Hello Matthew,

Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:47:18 PM, you wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 01:19:07PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

>> 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.

> Other distributions manage this without too much trouble, so I don't see
> it being a problem to adopt this policy.

> -- 
> Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org

1 word: Resources - person power, time, funding, equipment, etc.

Fedora  is  a  free  software  distribution  "staffed"  informally  by
volunteers  (except for that minority of folks who may be paid to work
on Fedora as their day job).

RHEL  has  the resources to backport.  Centos uses those backpotrs for
free,  but does not generate them (unless again the party supporting a
component for Centos happens to be upstream in RHEL).

At  times  Fedora  barely  has  the  resources to stumble forward from
release to release.  Adding more mandatory costs for older releases is
simply not practical or possible.

Then  there  is  the whole "voluntary" part of volunteer.  Backporting
can  be  difficult, time consuming, frustrating, or simply impossible.
The incentive of $$ from paying customers simply is not there.

-- 
Best regards,
 Al                            mailto:al.dunsmuir at sympatico.ca