Keeping old versions of packages

[Mathieu Bridon]

On Wednesday, April 10, 2013 12:09 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 05:16:45PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> To be clear, the plan I heard (which isn't mine and I don't think is
> finished anyway) isn't to *withhold* updates until a certain date; it's to
> batch them up and make them available as a collection by default. If want
> all *or some* updates as soon as they become available, you could still do
> that.

For what it's worth, this is exactly what we do at $dayjob.

The way I set our repos up is that there are 1 testing repo, and 2 
stable repos: "current" and "released".

We use Bodhi to move things from "testing" to "current", as they get 
QA-ed, just like in Fedora.

But by default, neither the "current" nor "testing" repositories are 
enabled. Only the "released" repository is.

Once a month, we synchronize "current" into "released".

This way, we have the monthly « Patch Tuesday » by default, and it's 
trivial to move to the model of getting updates as they are published if 
you want to.

It also allows users to be selective: they can get an update without 
waiting if it's important to them, but without updating everything else 
right now.


-- 
Mathieu