Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Dejavu has matured a lot so new releases are incremental improvements with
> no big feature changes.
... i.e. exactly the kind of things which should be pushed as updates!
> Not worth it pushing updated packages for previous releases (that will be
> installed by pretty much everyone, since DejaVu is in the default set)
If there are bugfixes, added glyphs or any other nontrivial change (which
doesn't break things), it probably IS worth pushing.
> Also, you may have liked the monthly churn, but even lwn.net editors
> complained of it publicly
Journalists have nothing better to do than complaining. If they can't
complain about updates, they'll find something else to complain about.
Please listen to actual users, not journalists!
> Lastly it gives me more time to work on new packages for new releases.
Huh? I do updates for stable releases routinely. It's fairly little work:
just sync the Rawhide changes (by copying the files over the branch ones),
commit, make tag, make build BUILD_FLAGS=--nowait and at some later point in
time, queue the update for testing, then a week later for stable (or just go
directly for stable if there are really just minor changes).
> At the risk of repeating myself one Fedora release cycle is not long
It's still 6 times as long as some projects', like KDE now (when counting
bugfix releases, the feature cycle is 6 months) or DejaVu in the past! If we
don't push new versions of those projects with monthly releases as updates,
our users have to wait up to half a year (also counting the final freeze) to
get the fixes they've been waiting for, which is completely unnecessary.
> and if we didn't waste our users' time by constant gratuituous updates in
> stable releases they could allocate more to update when a new Fedora
> version was published.
I doubt that. Routine updates get done quickly and you can even do other
stuff while they're running. Upgrading to a newer Fedora requires more
planning.
> People who want the latest of everything and do not mind unstability
> should run rawhide.
But what should people who want the latest of everything that doesn't break
things, but do mind instability or feature regressions run? That's exactly
the niche Fedora is targeting (there are plenty of other distros which cater
to the update haters, e.g. RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian stable and many
others) and why we're pushing updates to stable releases. The fact that we
aren't doing so consistently is a problem, which is why I'm complaining
about lazy and/or paranoid maintainers like you who aren't participating.
> Stop rawhidizing stable please.
What I'm suggesting is NOT rawhidizing stable. It's pushing new versions to
stable where they:
* fix bugs,
* possibly add some additional features users have been waiting for,
* DO NOT drop features,
* DO NOT require manual reconfiguration,
* DO NOT break compatibility with existing user data (documents, savegames
etc.),
* DO NOT cause major UI changes (but I think minor UI changes are fine!),
* DO NOT knowingly introduce new bugs (e.g. in KDE SIG, we make it a high
priority to fix all known regressions before promoting a KDE update to
stable; but the important point there is that we can't fix what we don't
know about).
These criteria are very different from Rawhide or upgrading to the next
release! But a lot of version upgrades (and dejavu-fonts is part of those)
fulfill those requirements and should thus be pushed!
Kevin Kofler
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