[Mageia-dev] please stop doing "bugs" for updating magia 1

Pascal Terjan pterjan at gmail.com
Wed Jan 11 17:54:57 CET 2012


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 16:48, Christian Lohmaier
<lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Guillaume Rousse
> <guillomovitch at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Le 11/01/2012 16:09, Antoine Pitrou a écrit :
>>
>>> As a Mageia user I would expect Mageia to package significant *bugfix
>>> releases* and ship them in the updates for the stable distro.
>>
>> You'd rather read the current update policy, rather than expect blind
>> assertions:
>> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Updates_policy
>
> Whoa - this is a rather stupid policy. (my opinion, yours obviously differs).
> "For the most part, an update should consist of a <bold>patched build
> of the same version</bold> of the package released with the
> distribution,"
>
> Welcome to distro-isolation, putting burden on maintainers, giving
> them all the reason to deny a reasonable request for a bugfix release
> because it just is too much work to hunt for a specific commit that
> fixed bug x.
>
>>> For example, it would be nice if an up-to-date Mageia 1 system had
>>> Python 2.7.2 rather than Python 2.7.1 (not a deal-breaker, of course,
>>> but nice). There's more than a hundred bug fixes between the two
>>> versions and I don't expect Mageia to have independently fixed many of
>>> these bugs.
>>
>> A bug may vary from a typo in a man page to a critical security update,
>
> And a typo-fix is not worthwhile to have?
>
>> which make the number of claimed bugfix a poor decision metric. A
>> non-regression ensurance would be a better one, but it's quite difficult to
>> assert.
>
> Don't assume all upstream projects are a bunch of clueless idiots.

Don't assume the opposite either, it really depend on each project.

> For upstream releases that have a clear version/release scheme, with
> micro releases being compatible bugfixes only, the above mentioned
> policy is completely nonsense, same for your fear of regressions, etc.

Yes, bugfix only release have always been accepted, this should be
added to the exceptions on the wiki.

> Sure, you cannot be save of regressions, but what makes you think you
> are smarter than upstream? What makes you so sure that not the one
> commit you add as a patch to your package is the one that causes the
> regressions?

Because the most changes you had, the most likely a regression is

> Regressions have the nice habit of being triggered by changes in
> apparently unrelated code...
>
> My 0.02€ only, but I strongly suggest for that update policy to be clarified.
> When there is no dedicated bugfix release procedure in the upstream
> package, an update is a rebuild of the same version with a
> corresponding patch. That's reasonable (as opposed to using a newer
> minor or even major release, those are backports).
> But once again: if upstream has a major.minor.micro scheme with micro
> versions being bugfix releases, I really don't see any sane reason for
> not "allowing" those updates.

Yes, they are actually allowed.


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