Fedora products, to upgrade rather than backport?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 5/15/06, Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> So in the RHL space, the choice was clear.  Backport whenever possible.
> However the Fedora landscape is different.  "Upstream" Core does not do
> backporting, they more often than not version upgrade to resolve
> security issues.  Why should Legacy be any different?  If we want to be
> transparent to end users we should follow what "upstream" does.
>

I think that we should try and take some reasonable goals for
timelines for security:

What should our goal be for turn-around time be for a vulnerability?
[Off the wall answers below.]
  Critical: 48 hours
  Moderate: 168 hours
  Low: 720 hours

Second, how hard is it to backport?
  Hard: Code is no longer maintained and a quick patch attempt showed
lots of collisions and rewrites.
  Moderate: Code is maintained, but code is different.
  Low: Patch was given for this version or code is only slightly different.

Third, how expert are you (the patcher) on what the vulnerability is,
what the code is, and how you are 'stopping' the vulnerability from
being there.

I think from those three, one could work out a decision tree on
backporting or new release. In the case of new releases, we would make
it part of the QA process to try and give a quick documentation of
changes between old version and new version.
> Flames?  Thoughts?
>
> --
> Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
> Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator