On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 19:22 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 02:18:23PM -0500, Al Dunsmuir wrote: > > Hello Matthew, > > > Other distributions manage this without too much trouble, so I don't see > > > it being a problem to adopt this policy. > > 1 word: Resources - person power, time, funding, equipment, etc. > > > > Fedora is a free software distribution "staffed" informally by > > volunteers (except for that minority of folks who may be paid to work > > on Fedora as their day job). > > > > RHEL has the resources to backport. Centos uses those backpotrs for > > free, but does not generate them (unless again the party supporting a > > component for Centos happens to be upstream in RHEL). > > Debian has historically managed this. I really don't buy the argument > that security or other critical fixes are generally difficult to > backport. Well, having had some experience with doing it, I can say it cuts both ways. I don't code, never have, probably never will. Mostly I managed to ship good updates for the Mandriva packages I maintained. For security issues a minimal patch is usually provided as part of the advisory. For bugfixes, you can *usually* make it work by extracting the specific fix from the revision control system and applying it to the version of the software you shipped, maybe with some little trial-and-error munging occasionally. But sometimes, the fix doesn't apply cleanly or almost cleanly to the older version of the code, and you have to go and find someone from upstream - or someone who knows how to code with the time and inclination to help - to help you sort it out. So yeah, most of the time it's okay, but sometimes doing this _can_ be a problem for a non-coding maintainer (and probably it's sometimes a problem even for a coding maintainer, in rarer cases). And it is definitely somewhat more effort than just shipping a version bump. Shipping a version bump takes about three minutes, backporting a patch can be an hour or two job. Of course, if you're doing your job properly, *testing* is more lengthy for the version bump. =) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
