Rolling release Fedora - "testing-release"-Proposal

Matthias Runge mrunge at matthias-runge.de
Mon Jan 30 07:50:11 UTC 2012


On 30/01/12 00:59, Henrique Junior wrote:
> I've started talking to Greg KH, the guy who implemented openSUSE
> Tumbleweed. Here is what he said:


Oh great. Thank you for doing something constructive here.


I'm concerned about bundled libs and requirements of libraries. If I
remember right, up to a certain point, gnome was dependant on a special
javascript-library of firefox. So updateing firefox to a higher version
would have broken gnome (to a certain point).

One could avoid this, if one would include required libraries for own
packages. (canceling the no-bundled-libs-rule).
This rule afaik does not exist in SuSE. Their guidelines have this: [1]
(same for fedora [2])

Packages in openSUSE should make every effort to avoid having multiple,
separate, upstream projects bundled together in a single package.

In other words: as maintainer you should try to avoid bundling libraries
and other dependencies, but it's not strictly forbidden, like in fedora. [3]

In some other ways, I had the feeling, other distros didn't try to be as
clean as fedora tries to be (I must admint, I have a very limited and
onesided view). Being less strict here creates more freedom for package
maintainers.


Maybe introducing a "testing"-release as concession to both sides is
acceptable?

- newest versions, including risk of being broken -> rawhide
- (merely) stable versions will be propagated from rawhide to "testing"
- branching stable versions each six months (or so) from testing-branch

If someone wants a rolling release, he might use "testing" without the
bleeding edge of rawhide. A testing version just wouldn't break
everything we had in the past and also support a more usable testing
platform.

Matthias



[1]
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_guidelines#Bundling_of_multiple_projects

[2]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Bundling_of_multiple_projects

[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries

-- 
Matthias Runge <mrunge at matthias-runge.de>
               <mrunge at fedoraproject.org>


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