Keeping old versions of packages

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

Am 09.04.2013 14:27, schrieb Matthew Miller:
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 10:10:26AM +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
>> I'm wondering what the interest would be in keeping packages
>> referenced in metadata on the mirrors for say a month? We'd probably
>> need a separate fedora-security repo too that's designed to be kept
>> small enough so that metadata checks every day would be not costly in
>> terms of bandwidth and time.
>> If anyone is interested in doing this, you'd be awesome. Thanks.
>
> I've heard of a plan in development about batching non-critical updates into
> monthly sets. It seems like these two things could go together

I'm sorry, but that is a very bad idea. When users report bugs, and I mean
real bugs here, like crashes or non working functionality. I always do
my best to get them a fixed package asap, and AFAIK they really appreciate
this.

Moreover this is just a very non Fedora thing to do, one of the things
Fedora is, is about being First. A lot of out users expect us to quickly give
them new packages after upstream bug-fix releases. Lumping these all together
in a single day in the month just does not feel like a Fedora thing to do.

Also many packages in Fedora are maintained by volunteers lumping all the
updates together will mean a flag day where all of the packages maintained
by someone will get pushed at once, leading to a peak in work load, since
despite testing, etc. There will be regressions as well as new packages
sometimes leading to questions. And there also will be a peak workload
a few days before the flag day to try and get things in now, instead
of needing to wait a month.  Having such peak workloads is not a good
idea in general, and esp. not with volunteers.

Regards,

Hans