Fedora "backports" repo? (Was Re: PostgreSQL 9 for F14?)

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Tue Sep 21 00:43:43 UTC 2010


On Mon, 2010-09-20 at 16:31 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 2010/9/20 Michał Piotrowski <mkkp4x4 at gmail.com>:
> > Yes. Most users don't care about libfoo 1.6.54 -> libfoo 1.7.0 upgrade.
> > It's cool if you have strange problems with PgPool
> 
> 
> You understand that what you have just describe is not easily wrapped
> into a self-consistent policy right?  There are undoubtably "strange
> problems" one one sort of another which impact "niche users" across
> the existing packagescape and backports to address their problems
> would not meet any reasonable definition that relied on the
> anticipated desires of "most users."  Every conceivable possible
> update will most likely solve a problem for someone.  You haven't
> really sketched out a policy by which any reasonable person or persons
> could judge suitability of a particular potential update and exclude
> it from such a backports repository.

The Mandriva policy is a reasonable starting point:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Policies/SoftwareMedia#Backports_policy

it's sketchy and not greatly written, but the basic idea is that
backports should only be 'leaf' packages (things on which nothing else
depends) and libs required _only_ by the packages that are being
backported. Packages on which other, unrelated packages depend shouldn't
be backported.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net



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