On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 17:12, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
>
> > During the time we're doing feature
> > work for the next Gnome version, we don't typically spend a lot of time
> > backporting fixes to Fedora, we'll get everything when we move to the
> > new version anyway.
>
> Yeah, plus the newly introduced bugs. How about backporting important
> fixes upstream? That would make possible an upgrade to the latest
> release of the current branch used in FC.
As always, this is a question of resources, and where to focus them. Do
we work on FC3, or do we keep working on FC2 and ignore FC3. Sometimes
we do updates for the last stable release, but its not that common
(except for security updates).
Updates are much more resource demanding than rawhide work, because
there is no beta-test period so you have to be much more careful with
what you release, and the whole per-package update procedure just takes
a lot of time. If we were to backport every fix and release as an update
we just wouldn't have any time for FC3 at all.
> Although I am not very acquainted with the processes at the Gnome
> project I have the impression not a lot of time is being spent to
> stabilize the current branches. This is sad as it means people will
> always have to work with buggy (as in crashing) software. That's a bit
> more serious than a panel that doesn't (un)hide. So much for QA.
Each Gnome release cycle is 6 months, after 3 months or so we
feature/ABI freeze, and start working on bugfixing and stabilization,
near the end there is a hard freeze where each patch has to have release
team approval before commit. Then after 2.x.0 has been released we
generally spend some time (maybe a month or so, depends on the module)
doing stabilization work for that release before branching for 2.x+1.
However, it is true that after branching for the next devel release the
stable release doesn't alway get that much attention. We do try to
commit bugfixes to the stable branch, but some fixes are missed, and
some don't apply easily anymore.
If anyone wants to do upstream work to make sure bugfixes are getting
applied to stable branches, and generally help with the stable releases
that would be very nice. It tends to be hard to find contributors for
this, because it can be pretty boring work.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Alexander Larsson Red Hat, Inc
alexl@xxxxxxxxxx alla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
He's a maverick drug-addicted card sharp on the wrong side of the law. She's a
plucky cigar-chomping journalist with someone else's memories. They fight
crime!
