On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 18:54 +0300, Gilboa Davara wrote: > On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 17:23 +0200, Matej Cepl wrote: > > On 2009-05-12, 10:09 GMT, Gilboa Davara wrote: > > > and RHEL 5.3 would have been left with Firefox 1.5 instead of > > > Firefox 3.0. > > > > Please, keep RHEL out of this discussioni ... there are another > > reasons (mainly customers breaking-in our doors with RFE) for > > doing things we do, which are not applicable to Fedora. > It wasn't my intention to implicate RHEL in any way. > My point being that a "stable release policy" != "stagnant release > policy". If the maintainer feels that a new version fixes major > deficiencies in the existing version (beyond a simple bug fix) he should > be allowed to push a major upgrade (given sufficient testing) even if it > risk breaking existing installations. I don't really agree. There's wiggle room in *everything*, of course - Mandriva updates Firefox by major version jumps, when the old major goes out of maintenance, because on balance that's safer than trying to backport security fixes to a version of Firefox that's unsupported upstream - but at the level of setting overall policy, I wouldn't be in favour of that. But, to re-iterate, since it's easy to lose this point, I'm talking about *the theoretical 'stable' update source we don't yet have*, ONLY in the case where we decide we want one (i.e. we care about Aunt Flo). I would never have fed KDE 4.0 to Aunt Flo in the first place, and no distribution which cares about Aunt Flo did, so the discussion is a bit moot there. Mandriva, for instance, went to KDE 4 by default only with KDE 4.1, and Mandriva certainly wouldn't consider shipping KDE 4.2 as a 'stable' update for KDE 4.1. Neither would Ubuntu. You can *get* KDE 4.2 for both Mandriva and Ubuntu releases that shipped with KDE 4.1, but it's not released as a stable update, nor - IMO - should it be, *in a distribution which uses stable updates* (which, right now, Fedora isn't). > ... And if you don't trust your maintainers to make such a decision - > why the hell have you given them the right to package the software to > begin with? I don't think that follows at all. Updates policies, above all else, need to be consistent, and if you say "well, we'll try to be quite stable and safe, but ultimately it's up to the discretion of maintainers", you will never get consistency, because all maintainers are different. What Maintainer A considers a 'safe' upgrade will be different to what Maintainer B considers safe. Hence the user experience will be inconsistent. Effectively, the update process will only be as safe as the most happy-go-lucky maintainer's position - even though all other maintainers are more conservative. And that's not efficient, because you get all the drawbacks of instability from the maintainers who push whatever they like, and all the drawbacks of staleness from the maintainers who act very conservatively. This is why I say the only two policies that can really work optimally are "minimal necessary changes to fix strictly identified bugs and security flaws" or "update whatever you like". Either is valid, but both have distinct implications for the user experience, so we need to pick based on what user experience we want, and message that consistently so that users know what to expect. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
