REVIEW/RFC: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kevin/Updates_Policy_Draft

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 03:42 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> I think Kevin's proposal is written fairly with the given information.
> Still, I believe that the stable update guide needs to be relaxed for
> software that doesn't affect anything other than itself. There are
> single library packages that are not used by any applications, or used
> by at most 1 application. The API/ABI change in a stable release
> wouldn't break anything for such libraries.

I think if we're talking "stable releases", we can't be narrow-minded
about who could be impacted by an update. If a library package has no
actual users in Fedora (I maintain such a package!) that doesn't mean
no-one uses it: people will probably have compiled software against it
at some point.

ABI breaks are asking for trouble at the best of times, we've seen how
that can break Fedora-packaged software - but it can also break software
people have on their machines. The same applies to APIs too, if software
isn't compiled: PHP changes function behaviour surprisingly often, and
if that was updated and broke (for example) Wordpress, that would be
bad.

I'm not against people breaking A[BP]Is in stable releases, but I think
you need to have a really excellent reason to do it. 

Cheers

Alex.



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