Delays in package processing

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2007 at 11:25:17AM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jesse Keating (jkeating at redhat.com) said: 
> > I had hoped that common sense would prevail across our maintainers and
> > that stable releases would be treated as such, stable releases not to
> > be cheapened with lots of unnecessary updates just so that "users can
> > get the latest stuff!".  Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be what's
> > happening.  I don't want to introduce draconian policies and
> > procedures to enforce this, mostly because there just isn't enough time
> > in the day to supervise all the potential updates for whether they
> > should go out or not.
> > 
> > So I ask you, Fedora Community, how do we as a community ensure that
> > our stable releases stay just that, stable?
> 
> Well, it depends. For the stuff I maintain, I tend to follow different
> policies depending on the package:
> 
> - Library versions do not get upgraded in a stable release
> - The more core a package is, it only gets updated with occasional
>   severe bugfixes - it is not ever rebased.
> - More peripheral things, such as some desktop apps, get updated to
>   the latest minor bugfix version
> 
> Hard to say how much this works for everyone, though.

Not very well. I almost do the opposite with the virt stack

We always upgrade libvirt in all supported Fedora releases because
there is large demand for new virt features, but more importantly 
because upstream have strict rule that we never break ABI of the
library, or syntax of the command line virsh tool. Occassionally there
are bugs introduced, but on the whole upgrading all Fedora releases
has brought in improved testing coverage & stability for all.

Now for the GUI apps, I tend not to update existing releases to new
versions, until the new version has been out in rawhide for at least
several months & gotten positive feedback, because any UI changes 
are immediately noticed by people.

Really what I'm saying is that the base library has very good stability
across releases, while the UI layer is not so stable. So mandating that
libraries are not upgraded, while perhipheral desktop apps can be upgraded
is pretty much reverse of what is suitable for virt.

Dan.
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