OpenOffice 3.1

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 21:16 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:

> It's true that inconsistency is bad, and that's the problem with the current
> policy, but there's no better solution. At best, we can give more hints to
> the maintainers, but there's no policy which works for all packages.
> Hardcoded bureaucracy doesn't really work, in particular, the 2 "all or
> nothing" solutions you propose:
> 
> > This is why I say the only two policies that can really work optimally
> > are "minimal necessary changes to fix strictly identified bugs and
> > security flaws" or "update whatever you like". Either is valid, but both
> > have distinct implications for the user experience, so we need to pick
> > based on what user experience we want, and message that consistently so
> > that users know what to expect.
> 
> are both completely broken. The first turns Fedora into yet another "Debian
> stable type" distribution: this seems to be what you're advocating, but
> there are already several of those and Fedora would lose one of the main
> things it is about (being always up to date) by endorsing such a policy.
> The second basically turns all releases into Rawhide, which is
> unfortunately unsuitable for daily use. A middle ground is needed, and
> that's where the maintainer has to make a call. And this is why the policy
> is as it is now.

I'm not advocating either. I'm perfectly happy with either. I don't have
a personal opinion on whether we should be an Aunt Flo-supporting distro
or not. I can work happily with either choice, I just want to know which
we are, so I can tailor my approach appropriately. :)

Let's make it clear: what we're talking about as 'the second' above is
basically where I think we are now. Leaving it to the maintainer's
discretion is equivalent to 'ship whatever you like', because that's
exactly what some maintainers do already, there's all sorts of stuff
shipped out as updates for stable releases.

As I said, if we actually actively want to be there, that's fine. But we
have to be consistent with that, both in our approach to other things,
and to messaging. We need to be telling potential and actual users,
prominently, that we're *not* a Mandriva/Ubuntu/Debian stable-type
distribution, and that they shouldn't use Fedora if that's what they're
expecting. At present, we don't really do this.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net