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

[Juan Luis Baptiste]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Christian Lohmaier
<lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

You don't do packaging, right ?

it isn't that hard and is how all distro's do it. Look at Fedora or
SuSE's packages and you will see a lot of patch files fixing single
bugs. It's a matter of following upstream bugzilla reports and see
which commit fixes the issue in question, create a patch from it and
apply it to the package. Most of the time you can get the patches to
fix single bugs from other distros packages.

If there's a bugfix-only release it's better as it will be easier to
update, but many times they aren't and include new features which
could introduce regressions so we have to cherry pick those fixes.
Also many times there isn't a new release from upstream so the only
option we have is to backport a single fix.

>> 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?
>

I think that what was meant here is that there are priorities for QA,
where a security update is much more important and deserves more
attention than a typo-fix. Of course, you are welcome to join the QA
team to help them test those not so critical fixes if you really care
that much about them.

>
> 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 as I said earlier, we backport the "commit" that fixes that
single issue, based on the info found on the bugzilla report of the
upstream project. Also as you say most of the times upstream is not a
bunch of clueless idiots so they will document very well each commit,
making it easier for us to find those fixes.

Cheers,

-- 
Juancho