Backporting policy

[Christian Pearce]

Interesting.  I backported ethereal yesterday, even though RHL9 was an upgrade.  I can't believe they did that.  I generated a patch myself from CVS.  I believe everything works fine, I still need QA and testing to be done.

I was originally going to just do what RedHat did.  I thought the policy was to follow their lead.  But I was encouraged on the IRC Channel to backport.  It turned out to be easier than I thought.

Personally this is problably the best way to go.  People who are not moving forward with the newer releases probably don't have time to test upgrades of systems they don't want to touch.  Therefore would appreciate the updates not containing newer versions.  Considering newer version can introduce unwanted change.  If they want the newer versions then they would already be on the newer release of Fedora Core.  Does this make sense?

My vote is backport backport backport.  And I am willing to package and QA to back that statement up.

I believe once Fedora Legacy hits a decents stride with backporting it will make sense for use to stay in the groove.  Rather than shifting gears towards updating to newer versions from Fedora Core (x).  Although I admit it might be nice not to have to duplicate work.  I think taking a new rpm form a newer distribution and sticking it in an old will create major headaches though.  But maybe that wasn't exactly what was intended.

--
Christian Pearce
http://www.commnav.com



Eric Rostetter said:
> 
> Quoting Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net>:
> 
> > Backporting has been the goal since day 1 for previous RHL releases.  FC
> 
> Yes, and should stay that way.  There are exceptions, but these should be
> very few...
> 
> > releases is still in the air.  RH will not focus so much on backports
> > for FC updates, rather they'll go the route of new packages.  How
> > should Legacy respond to this?
> 
> They should backport as much as possible, but at the point that it becomes
> too much of a burden to backport then an update would be appropriate.  For
> RHL, the backport is paramount, even if it means a lot of work to do so.
> For Fedora, we should consider the amount of work to backport versus the
> stability of an upgrade, and pick which way to go based on the ratio of
> work to stability.
> 
> --
> Eric Rostetter
> 
> 
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