On Sat, Mar 06, 2010 at 11:07:13PM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote: > Most of our packagers follow the guidelines from the wiki: > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_update_guidelines > This means, they apply at least three criteria: > * An update should not break something > * An update should be backwards compatible, e.g. it should not > change the syntax or location of a config file so that old > settings can no longer be applied. > * An update should not change the behavior of an basic > application, e.g. think of when Thunderbird started indexing > automatically after an update. > > Summing it all up I think I don't think it is pretty obvious that the > KDE SIG uses different criteria then most other maintainers. This is > just a statement and no criticism. > Since I just re-read that page when it came up in a different thread, I have to say that your bullet points don't seem to quite match what I read on that page. * An update should not break something On the wiki page it's not so black and white -- instead it's a decision that the package maintainers must make to balance: "The benefit of the bugfixes and new features should be weighed up against the risk of regressions." * An update should be backwards compatible This is not really on there. Your example is a subset of backwards compatibility which can find justification here: "an update doesn't cause a users' applications or system to stop working suddenly." But other examples of backwards incompatibility (for instance updated libraries with new SONAMES to address critical bugs if rebuilds of apps in fedora are performed, changes to config files if an automatic conversion is available) would be allowed. * An update should not change the behavior This is actually not mentioned at all. As for whether the KDE SIG is currently following the guidelines on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_update_guidelines I would argue that they are. Their upstream is providing releases that have both bugfixes and enhancements in one release. They've evaluated the risk of regression and figure that backporting of requested features and bugfixes is more likely to cause regresions than upgrading to upstreams supported release. They push the updates to multiple repos for testing before it gets to the normal updates repository in order to mitigate the risk of regression. They did not push KDE4 to a release that only had KDE3 because the update was considerd to break working systems. All this seems to indicate that the KDE SIG is working hard to evaluate the stuff they're pushing with the guidance on the Package_update_guidelines page rather than blindly pushing new upstream releases which have no benefit to Fedora users. -Toshio "Wondering how your post about a midnight commander update not following good update practices turned into claiming the same for KDE" Kuratomi
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