Hello fellow Fedora hackers! I've noticed a few times recently that some backwards incompatible changes were submitted to Bodhi. I would like to implore us all to remember that we have users who may become confused and/or frustrated when a dnf/yum upgrade/update causes their system not to work like it did before. Remember, it's not sufficient to use dnf to check what other packages have Requires on you to know if it is OK to release a backwards-incompatible change, because you can't know what users might be depending on the API/behavior/configuration stability of your package. I think we all want Fedora to be a great operating system for our users, but reverse-incompatible changes could drive them away to a different community. This is why the packaging guidelines state that updates should only be for bug/security fixes, and not for major changes: "Releases of the Fedora distribution are like releases of the individual packages that compose it. A major version number reflects a more-or-less stable set of features and functionality. As a result, we should avoid major updates of packages within a stable release. Updates should aim to fix bugs, and not introduce features, particularly when those features would materially affect the user or developer experience. The update rate for any given release should drop off over time, approaching zero near release end-of-life; since updates are primarily bugfixes, fewer and fewer should be needed over time. This necessarily means that stable releases will not closely track the very latest upstream code for all packages. We have rawhide for that." https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy#Stable_Releases I know we all want the same thing - for Fedora to be awesome! I just wanted to send out a friendly reminder of this policy because I'm concerned about the stability of Fedora and EPEL. Thank you for reading! -- Randy Barlow xmpp: bowlofeggs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx irc: bowlofeggs on Freenode
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
-- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
