Update guidelines? (was: Re: Moving ImageMagick to Extras?)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi all!

Jeremy Katz schrieb:
> On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 01:02 +0100, Jose' Matos wrote:
>> <rant>
>> Fedora seems sometime a schizophrenic distribution, sometimes some packages 
>> are updated to the last available stable version, sometimes not.
> To some extent, this is what you're *always* going to get if you have
> more than one person maintaining all of the packages.  Different people
> will have different comfort levels with doing upgrades (and want to do
> different things first).  The relationship the maintainer has with the
> upstream also plays a part.

I wondering if we might need "update guidelines" (note: guidelines,
*not* policy) in the longer term.

To give an example: What I really like in Fedora Core are the the
updates to the latest kernel-versions (like the update to 2.6.17 some
days ago) because you I get a lot of new drivers for new hardware this
way (*1).

But a kernel-update also bears risk to break things. Okay, yes, I still
have a older version on my harddisk when the new one breaks -- but if
the new kernel doesn't boot on the only-remotely-accessible webserver I
might be in trouble.

So in the case of the kernel my vote for a update guideline would be:
Updating to the latest kernel is fine for the current stable
distribution (FC5 currently), but it IMHO should be avoided for stable-1
(FC-4 currently)? Why? Well, mainly for two reasons

- because most users that want the latest and greatest software are on
FC5 (or devel) already
- those that still run FC4 have machines that work fine and are probably
mostly glad

Yes, I can hear davej already saying "having to maintain two codebases
for FC4 and FC5 is much more work than maintaining one kernel version
for both". Yes, I can understand that argument. But FC4 will be in
maintain-mode soon (three to four weeks) anyway so I think in this
special case FC4 should have sticked with 2.6.16.

Just my 2 cent

CU
thl

*1 -- /me really hopes that FC5 gets a update of X.org to 7.1 soon
because that way we would improve hardware support even more (FC5 still
has no support for Intels 945GM IIRC and that's really frustrating :-/
). Updated X-drivers would also be a good start, but it seems that's
still a hard job even in times of modular X.