Keeping old versions of packages

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2013-04-09 at 17:16 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> 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.

Can't they get them from updates-testing if they need a fix "right
now" ?

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York