On Sun, 2010-11-21 at 23:04 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote: > In short: Want higher-quality updates for previous releases? Then push > version upgrades wherever possible (even and especially for libraries, as > long as they're ABI-compatible or can be group-pushed with a small set of > rebuilt reverse dependencies)! I don't agree with this at all. It's just abusing a stable release cycle to try and make it into something it isn't. I should probably clarify where I'm coming from on this, as my position is probably more nuanced than my mails so far would seem to suggest. I don't necessarily think Fedora works best as a project which does stable releases every six months and supports at least two of them at a time (and often three). As I've written elsewhere, I'd very much like to look into the possibility of changing that. But the fact remains that *right now*, this is what Fedora is. I think that it makes sense to commit to being whatever we are fully. Right now, we're a stable release distribution; we should work to make those releases properly stable, to actually be what we represent ourselves as being. If we follow your strategy of pushing as many updates as possible as aggressively as possible to all stable releases, we're not being a stable release distribution at all, we're just shipping three branches at a time which are all essentially rolling releases and have absolutely no guarantee of stability. It's the worst of all worlds: we get all the messy overheads of supporting three releases at a time, but none of the benefits you get from properly following a stable release model. It seems like what you want is actually not to have three releases at a time at all but to have one and update it constantly. And I actually rather suspect that would be a model that would work well for Fedora, and I'd like to look into adopting it. But it's *not* the model we have right now, and it doesn't strike me as a bad idea to try and abuse a stable release model by pushing admittedly unstable changes into the stable releases. A stable release into which we cheerily shove new versions of everything just for the hell of it really isn't a stable release, and it has no clear identity separation from the next or previous stable releases, and hence makes the whole idea of having releases rather pointless and just dead weight overhead. If we all somehow got together and agreed to turn Fedora into something different and less committed to the stable release model, I would then rather change my tune on what our procedure for doing updates ought to be. But as long as the Fedora project as a whole remains committed to the stable release model, our updates policy really ought to reflect that model. -- 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
