There's been a lot of talk about a stable release lately. Most agree
that its not what Fedora does best and not something that would be
natural for us to do. I have a sort of middle-ground proposal that might
be easy enough to implement that we could try it out.
Currently, when a packager has an update, he runs "make update," and
bodhi goes and grabs the package out of koji and places it in the next
mash of the updates-testing repo (Luke, please shout when I start
getting this wrong). Then, bold subscribers to updates-testing install
it, check it out, and if two people report in that it didn't eat their
brane, it goes into the regular updates repo. That slim sanity check
prevents a whole helluva lot of breakage, but isn't a very broad testing
of the package.
What I propose is having another repo called updates-slow. Like updates
testing this repo ships with Fedora but is disabled and hidden by
default. Interested parties would have to manually enable it, and
disable the regular updates repo. updates-slow would relate to updates
in a similar way that updates relates to updates-testing: packages would
go into it after people getting the general Fedora updates seem to be
ok. The criteria here would have to be much harder than the two karma
points it takes to move out of testing, I would suggest the people
interested in this feature form a group that decides what the entry
policy should be.
The advantage is that this is fairly cheap to set up. Bodhi would need
some level of changes (Luke, what do you think?) but there's no
branching. We're basically just taking the ability which already exists
in yum to selectively take updates and providing a system to
collaboratively exploit this mechanism.
Not branching, however, also creates a disadvantage: with no ability to
create new packages, the slow repo can't take newer fixes without taking
an entire update. The slow repo must consume updates from Fedora in
whole packages; they don't have patch-level control over incoming
changes. Also, the slow repo has to synchronize at release time; you
can't have a late-F9-with-bits-of-F10 offering (hopefully though the
base set is the peak of mainline Fedora's QA).
If the people interested in a stability feature are willing to help
govern and maintain this repo, and help with the bug load (we can't just
dump bugs against backdated versions directly on the maintainers), then
it could go a long way to meeting their needs.
Thoughts?
--CJD
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