To update or not to update...

[Rahul Sundaram]

Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

> 
> Sure. But we have a mailing list and sending a "what do you guys think:
> should I update from foo-x.y to foo-x.(y+1) or foo-(x+1).0 because bar"
> is not that much overhead IMHO.

Yes but in many cases the people most qualified to make that 
determination are those maintaining the packages. If you want to 
explicitly document that maintainers have the choice to ask in this 
list, that would be a good thing to do.
> 
> I'd like to agree, but seems at least some people simply build new stuff
> for EPEL and don't care (or don't know) about the "only update to new
> version if there is a strong need to" policy which EPEL has. So we
> sooner or later need tell those maintainers to be more careful, adjust
> our policy/goals, start EPEL-rolling in parallel, <insert other
> possibilities> or live with the fact that parts of the EPEL-stable repo
> follow the a rolling-release scheme similar to Fedora while other parts
> go for the careful RHEL-style. The latter would IMHO be quite bad, and I
> really don#t want us to go in that direction.

Watch changes. If you see maintainers pushing updates where it isn't 
required then engage them in a private discussion. Maybe they have 
reasons to update which wasn't obvious. Maybe there wasn't aware of the 
policy or thought that this particular instance needed a exception for 
valid reasons. Lets see if there are problems to be solved before 
attempting to solve any.

Rahul