Packaging committee report 2006-12-19

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 12/19/06, Christopher Stone <chris.stone at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh it may work, but the probability of it working 100% correctly
> diminishes pretty dramatically I would assume.  Personally I think it
> is a bad idea and we should always encourage people to upgrade one
> distro release at a time.

There is a whole spectrum of options inside the word encourage.  And
surely there are a number of ways to actively encourage people to
upgrade on each available release..without actively discouraging
people who feel the need to holdback.  I only personally encourage
people to do fresh installs, but people aren't always prepared for
that.

Making it possible to skip a release is not necessarily encouraging
people do it. People already are waiting to skip a release, for their
own reasons, regardless of the current update support  policy.
Similarly there are nutjobs out there who try to skip two releases or
more.
I don't think shifting the support lifetimes is going to re-classify
who is and who is not a nutjob.

Hopefully the leadership in the new fedora-testing initiative will
have some bright ideas on how to better organize regression testing
for upgrades so that upgrades can be percieved as a more reliable
process than it currently is, even from release to release without
skipping.

-jef