[Mageia-dev] Proposal of a backporting process

[Michael Scherer]

Le mercredi 29 juin 2011 à 10:56 +0200, Angelo Naselli a écrit :
> mercoledì 29 giugno 2011 alle 00:23, andre999 ha scritto:
> > A leaf package is a package that is not required by any other package.
> > But leaf packages will always require something else.
> > If B requires A, then A is not a leaf package, even though B could be.
> > When backporting B, we test to make sure that it works with release A.
> > Obviously it restricts what can be backported, but the trade-off is that backports will 
> > (almost always) work, and they won't break anything.
> 
> Well my point is i often backport something for my job (for the most
> commoncpp2 now, ucommon in future), and since they are libraries i can fall
> in errors. I always tested before backporting though, and i haven't had any problems
> upgrading, but that's me and i could have been lucky.
>
> If we can accept some exceptions from time to time, but proved (bug open, testing
> and updates/backports etc) i can think to have mageia not only at home or in a virtual
> box. Otherwise i can't see the need of backports, for me of course.

If we start to add exception while we do not even have started to agree
on the general case, we are never gonna go anywhere :)

I have the impression that everybody want to be able at the same time to
backport anything, and yet expect to have the same level of support and
quality, and without using any more ressources. 

Technically, anything could be backported with proper tests. After all,
that's roughly the process we use for cauldron ( ie, take a new version
of software, compile it on the distribution, and build later others
software against that ).

Every software have someone interested, from low level like kernel
( backported on kernel-linus, asked by people as seen on MIB ), or gcc
( gcc 4.6 being my main motivation for keeping a cooker installation )
to higher level like gajim or midori. The only thing that no one would
be interested is stuff that do not move ( at, linpng, etc ), ie
everything were there is no new features, and working fine. And even,
people could want to have a new feature, such as systemd, etc.

So in the end, if we want to satisfy everybody, the answer is to have no
policy forbidding anything and just say "do proper amount of QA". That's
fine by me ( especially since I do not use backports ), but we have to
agree on that.

-- 
Michael Scherer