some closure on the xorg updates issue

[Rahul]

Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Rahul <sundaram <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
>>>> In short, it's a major change with only modest benefit, and a better 
>>>> solution is coming soon.
>>> And what IS that "better solution"?
>> A well defined updates policy with the release engineering team to grant 
>> exceptions when required.
>>
>> Draft at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/UpdatesPolicy
> 
> And how is that a solution to the problem that an X.Org update is needed to add 
> support for some hardware (Intel) and improve support for others (ATI 
> r3xx/r4xx)?

It is not. We cant put everything that goes into rawhide into the 
general releases as update. Some features would only be available in the 
next release. We are holding out major updates in FC5 till we decide on 
the policy since we dont want to micro manage this on a case by case basis.


> 
>> Major new versions of system libraries, frameworks and desktop environments
>> MUST not be provided as updates and only in the subsequent releases.
> 
> Sigh, is that really what we want? 

We dont know yet which is why its called a draft.


FC4 got a major KDE upgrade, there was only
> one serious breakage (K3b) which was fixed by a subsequent K3b upgrade, and 
> which would most likely have been avoided if the KDE upgrade got through 
> updates-testing as the new update policy suggests requiring, and there were 
> visible benefits.

There were also several user complaints on the fedora-list
> about the lack of a KDE upgrade to 3.5.0 before it was pushed. KDE is 
> ABI-backwards-compatible as is most of GNOME, so apart from exposing bugs in 
> particular applications (which was what happened with K3b, and which 
> updates-testing is there for to catch), there is not much which can go wrong.

I have linked several discussions about regressions in updates so do 
verify your claims against bugzilla reports and list discussions.


> 
> Now if course, if "major" means upgrading KDE 3 to KDE 4 (even when KDE 4 gets 
> released officially), then I fully agree this doesn't make sense in a released 
> version (putting a parallel-installable kde4 into Extras is certainly a better 
> solution), but that's not how I read that clause.
> 

Normally KDE 3.x.y updates would be considered minor since they are bug 
fixes and 3.x updates would be considered major since they introduce 
several new features.

Rahul