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

[Juan Luis Baptiste]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Christian Lohmaier
<lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com> wrote:
> adding patches to the packages and releasing them instead of waiting
> for a new upstream release is different from having the policy to
> stick with whatever release was used when releasing the distro and
> then only apply fixes via patches.
>

Some times you can't wait for an upstream release, think for example
of a security update. Also not all projects do bugfix only releases,
but include new features as well so per our policy, we can't update to
that version and that's when we have to cherry pick updates to apply
to package in the stable version of mga. The problem seems to be that
that isn't clear on the policy.

> I'm not saying that you must not use patches to fix bugs. There are
> cases where a bug is homegrown/specific to the distro and thus not
> suitable for fixing upstream, there are cases where development cylce
> is too slow/it is not sensible to wait for upstream.
>

Exactly, plus the other case I just said.

> It is not a question whether it is possible. It is a question whether
> it makes sense in the first place.
> And no doubt it creates a lot more work for package maintainers.
> Both for initially hunting for the commit that fixes the bug, and
> later when patches conflict, and later when a package is updated to a
> new release.

As I said, no one is talking about picking up a fix if there's a bug
fix only release, it's for when it isn't and we need to reduce the
chance of regressions by taking the modifications that *exactly* fix
that bug.

>
>> Because as I said earlier, we backport the "commit" that fixes that
>> single issue,
>
> Every change, also those that introduce a regression is a "commit".
> So implicitly you're saying that you will only fix the "easy" bugs,
> but anything that involves more than touching 10lines of code will not
> be chosen, since it might introduce regressions.
>

No, I'm saying that we will look for the commit that fixes the issue
in question and not anything else, it doesn't matter if the fix is
one, 10, 50 lines and/or touches 1, 2 or 10 files.

And again, if there's a bugfix *only* release available when we are
working on a bug, or we know that there will be one soon, then we can
update to that version. In the other cases we have to go the long
route and patch the packges with individual fixes.

-- 
Juancho