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

[Kevin Kofler]

Peter Jones wrote:

> On 03/11/2010 07:26 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Upstream cannot go back in time and magically fix a bug in an old
>> release.
> 
> As an upstream maintainer, I wind up doing exactly this *constantly*.

No you don't. (I don't believe you invented time travel, sorry. ;-) ) You 
can only release a NEW release with this fixed. Which by a strict enough 
update policy (e.g. Debian stable's) already counts as a "new upstream 
release", even if you only made that one particular change.

And in addition, many upstreams don't work that way. Sure, they will release 
a new release with this fixed, but it will come from the current trunk which 
also has many other changes. Many upstream projects do not use branches, all 
releases come from the trunk, and it is totally impractical to make a fixed 
version of every past release ever made. Not to mention that they will also 
see no reason to do that: in fact, they will expect the packager to also 
ship those other changes, as they are all there for a reason, e.g. because 
they fix other bugs.

        Kevin Kofler