alpha/beta software in Fedora 8?

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Wed Nov 28 14:33:47 UTC 2007


On 11/28/2007 01:46 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 07:33 +0100, Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> On 11/28/2007 06:56 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>>>> "TC" == Tom \"spot\" Callaway <Tom> writes:
>>> TC> Such as? Open to suggestions here.
>>>
>>> We had
>>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Extras/Schedule/MaintainerResponsibilityPolicy
>>> which was never finished; the only thing in there is "Maintain
>>> stability for users".  I honestly don't see how you can be much more
>>> specific without introducing needless bureaucracy.  After all, the
>>> alpha releases of some projects are more stable then the full releases
>>> of others.
>> This seems pretty much perfect, actually.  What does it need in order to 
>> be "finished"?
> 
> Well, I'm not sure how it can be considered perfect when it does not
> begin to address the "alpha/beta" issue that you think is resolvable
> with packaging policy.
> 
> FWIW, I agree with Tibbs, since we have no way of determining how stable
> package releases are without trusting the maintainer.

I never said that we should resolve the alpha/beta issue.  I said we 
should have some form of (loose) criteria for maintainers in release 
branches.  "It must maintain stability" is a good criterion item.  Else, 
maintainers could just go breaking stuff and say "well, I thought Fedora 
was supposed to be bleeding edge - nobody told me I couldn't break stuff 
in a release".

It also serves as a great fallback policy in the unlikely case we 
(FESCo? RelEng?) ever find ourselves in the case where we need to decide 
to (nudge the maintainer to) revert a change because it breaks too many 
people.




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