Fedora Extras vs. CLOSED RAWHIDE

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 13:26, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Wed, 04 Aug 2004 12:23:29 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > 1) In exceptional/special cases, Fedora.us/FE should be permitted to
> > replace packages from FC if they break other FE packages or are unusable
> > in general.
> 
> Which effectively would fork FC maintenance.
It would not. FE would pickup packages from rawhide ("CLOSED RAWHIDE") 
rsp. repackage them. Of cause N-V-R need to be carefully adjusted to not
break upstream upgrades.

>  Not good. Users running FC
> would get different Core packages than users of FE. 
Yes, but this is supposed to not having any effect.

Core users will be using the broken package, which is supposed not to
have severe impacts on them (Otherwise RH/FC should have updated them),
while FE users will get "fixed packages".

> Different packages
> which may or may not result in different run-time behaviour, for
> instance, or break compilation of dependences. You cannot define what
> those "exceptional/special cases" are before you run into them. 
Exactly. I am talking about case-by-case decisions "on demand" and not
about "card blanche"'ing FE to repackage rawhide packages as part of FE.
> It would
> result in a case by case decision finding process. Also keep in mind
> that FC's bug-fix update policy is to prefer upstream version upgrades
> over backports.

User want functionality and want packages, they don't care about FC's
policies nor RH/FC's objectives.

It's simply as that: Users having to experience that packages are not
buildable for older releases and FE therefore not being able to provide
them because RH/FC and FE are not able to implement a fix, despite a fix
is known, gives a pretty poor picture about FC/FE and RH.

>  And if a bug in FC can be fixed and the community or
> [extras] developer community would benefit from a fix, there ought to be
> a bug fix release in the obvious place: FC Updates and nowhere else.
> 
> > 2) RH/FC commits their packagers to listen to FE's package update
> > demands and to benevolently consider to release bug-fix updates once
> > such a demand pops up.
> 
> Most likely also with contributors preparing and testing the fix. 

You seem to be missing one essential point:

The cases I am referring to, already have been fixed by _RH developers_,
therefore I am presuming they already performed at lease some testing,
rsp. these changes are so small that the risk can be estimated.
If not, these bugs should not have been "CLOSED RAWHIDE".
 
>  And
> remember, we're discussing general bug fixes, not attempts at massive
> version upgrades which would turn a stable FC release into FC Development.
Right, I am only referring to "CLOSED RAWHIDE" bugs that are supposed to
have been  fixed at some point in time between 2 official releases and
which have an actual impact on FE.

> The interesting bit is when a fix is available in Rawhide, who takes
> responsibility for pushing the fix as an update to an old FC version?
> This is where community QA must kick in and do the necessary regression
> testing, too.

Cf. above.

Ralf

BTW: With FC1 soon reaching its EOL, we might soon have the situation
that packages might get fixed as part of Legacy after FC1's EOL, while
there is no way to fix such bugs during FC1's life-time.

Bizarre, isn't it?