[Mageia-dev] please stop doing "bugs" for updating magia 1

[Christian Lohmaier]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Guillaume Rousse
<guillomovitch at gmail.com> wrote:
> Le 11/01/2012 16:09, Antoine Pitrou a écrit :
>
>> As a Mageia user I would expect Mageia to package significant *bugfix
>> releases* and ship them in the updates for the stable distro.
>
> You'd rather read the current update policy, rather than expect blind
> assertions:
> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Updates_policy

Whoa - this is a rather stupid policy. (my opinion, yours obviously differs).
"For the most part, an update should consist of a <bold>patched build
of the same version</bold> of the package released with the
distribution,"

Welcome to distro-isolation, putting burden on maintainers, giving
them all the reason to deny a reasonable request for a bugfix release
because it just is too much work to hunt for a specific commit that
fixed bug x.

>> For example, it would be nice if an up-to-date Mageia 1 system had
>> Python 2.7.2 rather than Python 2.7.1 (not a deal-breaker, of course,
>> but nice). There's more than a hundred bug fixes between the two
>> versions and I don't expect Mageia to have independently fixed many of
>> these bugs.
>
> A bug may vary from a typo in a man page to a critical security update,

And a typo-fix is not worthwhile to have?

> which make the number of claimed bugfix a poor decision metric. A
> non-regression ensurance would be a better one, but it's quite difficult to
> assert.

Don't assume all upstream projects are a bunch of clueless idiots.

For upstream releases that have a clear version/release scheme, with
micro releases being compatible bugfixes only, the above mentioned
policy is completely nonsense, same for your fear of regressions, etc.

Sure, you cannot be save of regressions, but what makes you think you
are smarter than upstream? What makes you so sure that not the one
commit you add as a patch to your package is the one that causes the
regressions?

Regressions have the nice habit of being triggered by changes in
apparently unrelated code...

My 0.02€ only, but I strongly suggest for that update policy to be clarified.
When there is no dedicated bugfix release procedure in the upstream
package, an update is a rebuild of the same version with a
corresponding patch. That's reasonable (as opposed to using a newer
minor or even major release, those are backports).
But once again: if upstream has a major.minor.micro scheme with micro
versions being bugfix releases, I really don't see any sane reason for
not "allowing" those updates.

ciao
Christian