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

[Radu-Cristian FOTESCU]

> Would this 'backports' repository section sound better to you if it is 
> renamed e.g. to 'rolling' ? (:

No, backports sounds very bad, except maybe for people coming from Mandriva. They (you!) must love the concept.

(Oh, maybe "trolling" instead of "rolling" :-))

Let me put it this way. People coming from Windows have this mind set:
-- when I am using a release the OS called Windows XP, the system in itself gets minor updates: SP1, SP2, SP3. I therefore expect a release of a Linux distro to update KDE 4.6 to 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.6.3, 4.6.4... Now, KDE 4.8 would be more like upgrading XP to Vista so _no_, this should _not_ go into "updates".
-- when I am using Windows XP, applications that don't need newer libraries, like Calibre, can be updated as they are released. I don't need a new release of the OS to update such an application! (And no, it's _not_ "backported" from Vista or Win7!) So why is this impossible in Linux? (Of course, when Calibre will need a newer Python , it would be a different matter, but this is not the case yet.)


Nwo, in Windows it's easy to downgrade in case of significant regressions.
Everyone can do that. Not that easy in Linux though. If I remember correctly
from the times when I was using Synaptic with Ubuntu, it was possible from a
menu to choose, for each package, what version to install -- this way,
downgrades were easy. Mandriva does not offer such a possibility. Either way, knowing that some major distros released with Linux _kernels_ that
brought major regressions, and that _ALL_ the distros release every now and
then X.Org with Intel/Nvidia/ATI drivers that _break_ (i.e. major regressions),
I feel that so much fuss for a "leaf" application (that only breaks some
features from itself, when this happens) is... too much fuss.

R-C