[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

[Olivier Méjean]

Le jeudi 7 octobre 2010 17:16:03, nicolas vigier a écrit :

> 
> And what makes you think end-users want new versions rather than
> stability ?

Well ... what about those sotwares whose new versions correct bugs but are not 
available for users ? If they correct bugs i may conclude they are more stable 
so they should be proposed to users. That's for the theory, in real life it is 
very different. Let's take Digikam (yes i love this software, killing 
application IMHO). When Mdv 2010 was released (11 months ago) it was 
digikam-1.0.0-0.5.2mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm thought updates i can have 
digikam-1.2.0-0.4mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm and thought backport 
digikam-1.2.0-0.2mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm. So nice done, but what about digikam 
1.3 released on june 2010 ? What about digikam 1.4 released on late august 
2010 ? These versions add stability by correcting bugs (and if you report a 
bug, the first advice is to update to 1.4 if digikam version used for reporting 
bug is not 1.4)

Digikam 1.4 is only available on Mdv 2010.1 as a backport not as an update.

So my feeling is that there is not necessary a relation between new version 
and unstability (ie new version is not stable). I could take the example of 
Scribus which latest stable is 1.3.3.14 (so 15 updates correcting bugs since 
1.3.3.0, releases which are purely bug fix release), no one would say that 
1.3.3.14 is less stable than 1.3.3.3. 

Developers are continuously improving their softwares, mainly by correcting 
bugs and adding functionnalities (and they are doing this in the same release, 
few exception, Scribus is one with a 4-years old branch updating with only bug 
fixes) and they used their last release to work on, so if we want to collabore 
efficiently upstream we should provide end-users latest stable versions so they 
can use it and report bugs that will be useful for developers.

-- 
Olivier Méjean
Président de l'Association des Utilisateurs Francophones de Mandriva Linux
http://mandrivafr.org
twitter : obagoom
identi.ca : goom