Backporting policy

[Warren Togami]

Charles R. Anderson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 01:28:04PM +0000, Christian Pearce wrote:
> 
>>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 think it is a myth that all Red Hat updates are backports.  Ethereal
> has always been upgraded rather than backported:
> 
> ethereal-0.9.11-0.90.1.src.rpm
> ethereal-0.9.13-1.90.1.src.rpm
> ethereal-0.9.16-0.90.1.src.rpm
> ethereal-0.10.0a-0.90.1.src.rpm
> 
> I actually preferred this for ethereal, since I like getting the new
> features :)  Also, API changes are not really a concern with ethereal.

I think we should also consider upgrading in cases where all of the 
following conditions are met:
1) Absolutely zero cases where API changes would effect any distribution 
OR 3rd party software, because the updated package is a leaf node on the 
dependency tree.  I suspect screen may be another leaf node.
2) Where having a common %{version} across multiple distributions would 
make it easier to maintain security updates, because patches need not be 
ported and tested multiple times.
3) Only by consensus of the list membership.

Thoughts?

Warren