[Mageia-dev] Backports policy clarification (and discussion)

[Sander Lepik]

08.06.2012 11:38, Samuel Verschelde kirjutas:
> I re-read the backports policy, and there's a part I think needs to be pointed 
> out before people start to backport packages. 
>
> "We need to ensure that upgrades never fail: cauldron must always have a 
> higher version/release than in stable releases."
>
> This statement is true, but implies more than what it says. It means that we 
> can't backport a package for Mageia 1 with a higher version than what we have 
> in Mageia 2 release (and updates?) media. And this, until we are able to take 
> backports into account during upgrades.
>
> Example :
> - Mageia 2 has wesnoth 1.10.2 in core/release
> - Mageia 1 can't get a higher version in its backports media 
>
> Do you all agree with my understanding of the policy ?
>
> This is a serious limitation to our ability to backport to Mageia (n-1) and 
> even to our ability to provide security fixes to backports there (will not 
> prevent it, but will prevent to do it by a version upgrade, which is the 
> common way to fix that kind of issue in backports).
>
> Maybe we shouldn't open backports for Mageia 1, and make sure upgrade to 
> Mageia 3 can take backports from Mageia 2 into account so that backports to 
> Mageia 2 are not stopped when Mageia 3 is released. Then we'll be safe.
>
> Samuel
I reread the backports policy and there are two lines that make backporting from cauldron to
mga1 impossible:
* Backports can be cherry-picked (ie, enable backports, install, disable backports).
* We need to ensure that upgrades never fail

In this regard we can support backports only with new version that is lower than the one on
next release. If we want to enable backports for mga1 we can backport only from mga2. Not
from cauldron. This way we can submit updates by submitting new backport into mga1 backports
repo (users would still have to update manually AFAIK).

Any objections?

--
Sander