re-posted here from fedora-advisory-board
=========
I wanted to spend a minute in response to the various threads about the
XOrg update that were on fedora-devel-list last week, and also as a
response to some of the blogosphere articles that were generated from
those threads, for example:
http://blog.eweek.com/blogs/eweek_labs/archive/2006/08/02/12050.aspx
There are several parts to this issue:
1) The xorg update is of benefit to Fedora users who do not depend on
proprietary drivers for their video cards.
2) As such, this update would be bad for users who do rely on proprietary
drivers, mainly because those proprietary drivers are not updated to
function properly with the new xorg code. Users who upgrade will be in a
tough spot until their proprietary software vendors relese updates.
3) The Fedora Project does not support any sort of proprietary software.
"Once free, always free".
4) The number of Fedora users who, due to the hardware that they own, are
forced to rely on proprietary video drivers is significant enough for us
to be concerned about breaking their systems.
5) This is more complicated than the case in which we release a new
kernel, because in that case it is trivial for a user to boot an old,
working kernel. In the case where packages are updated, the roll-back is
not as trivial of a process.
6) The xorg update is not a security update.
So there is a balance to be struck -- on one side you have the desire to
not make concessions to proprietary software vendors, but on the other
side you have the very real problem of unnecessarily breaking the systems
of users.
In short, it's a major change with only modest benefit, and a better
solution is coming soon. That's an argument that resonates with me, and
that has nothing to do with proprietary software, and everything to do
with stability for users.
Therefore, holding off on a non-security update in order to not break
users' systems, to me, is a reasonable decision to make in this situation,
especially when we are focusing our efforts entirely on Fedora Core 6 at
this point, which will include the most up to date Xorg software anyway.
I would further state that not all the members of the Fedora Board share
this exact opinion on this issue, but there is a general consensus that
holding off on this update for fc5 is the "better" decision of the two,
and so the Board does stand behind that decision as a group.
In addition, this debate has shown that we have a clear need to articulate
our update policy as clearly as possible, so that future decisions like
this will be easier to make. The work in that regard is going on here,
and I hope that Fedora community members will join in.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UpdatesPolicy
--
Max Spevack
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