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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 21:59 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Juha Tuomala wrote:
> > What comes to KDE's "there won't be anymore bugfix releases after
> > new feature release" - so what? How many real security issues has
> > there been in history? Five? Ten? I bet those all would be
> > backported by upstream if community size of Fedora would really need
> > them. Everyone who cannot wait those couple months, can do checkout
> > and compile themselves.
> 
> What about the thousands of non-security bugs? Do you not want those fixed? 

Well, sort of. It all depends. Not all bugs are created equal. Some are
things the developers consider 'bugs' but which the user may not; the
initial 'fix' may even constitute a regression in the user experience,
either intentionally or accidentally. Even some problems most users
would see as 'bugs' can be very disruptive to fix; the changed software
may have fixed the bug but present a different experience to the user,
who may not be expecting it.

It's all a game of semantics. If you take an aggressive enough
definition of bugs, KDE 4.0 is a 'bugfix' release.

> All large software projects have thousands of bugs.

Yep - and somehow *continue* to have thousands of bugs, all the time.
Intrinsic in your argument is an admission that new releases always
cause new bugs too, otherwise surely there'd be no bugs left in KDE by
now, after all these releases?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net