[Mageia-dev] Question about backports: calibre (bug 1659)

[Michael Scherer]

Le mardi 14 juin 2011 à 03:00 -0700, Radu-Cristian FOTESCU a écrit :
> 
> > So why does it have to be treated differently than the others since
> > there is nothing special about this release cycle  ?
> 
> Michael, please give me an example of an application that releases on average 5 time a month. Really, give me an example.

Release frequency never was a criteria for differentiating between
pushing something to updates and something to backports. 

And I see no reason why it would be in favor of doing a bug fix update
rather than a backport, especially if we ask to do a more stringent QA
checking on updates, as it would put too much work on the team.

> And, like it or not, calibre is _THE_ application for e-book lovers. For e-book users, it's as important as Firefox or
>  Chromium is for the rest of the people.

Again, that's not a criteria. Every software is important to at least
one person, and that would mean we should update everything if we start
to update everything important to one group of users. 


> Also, Mageia 1.0 was released with a version of this application shamefully old. 
>
> Fedora made a better judgment (I might just consider switching to Fedora, although I like Mageia more): 
> they released F15 with a recent version of calibre, 0.7.56, but they added in updates 0.8.0. For the 
> time being they stopped at 0.8.0, and only in Rawhide they pushed 0.8.4, which in my opinion is a good 
> judgment that would be a _balance_ between:
> 
> -- announced bug-fixes
> -- announced new features
> -- announced new hardware supported
> -- ad-hoc assessment of the risk brought by the new features (a heuristic
> process based mainly on experience as a user, experience as a software
> developer, and common-sense).Of course, the people who _make_ a distro are 
> its _owners_, and of course the reasoning of those who make Fedora is not 
> necessarily the best example to be followed by everybody, but as it happens, I prefer their brains.

You still do not explain where is the problem of using backports for
that. 

And for what it is worth, Fedora is discussing having separate update
and backport ( https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/515 ), even if the
discussion seems to be going nowhere at the moment 

-- 
Michael Scherer