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

[Buchan Milne]

On Wednesday, 11 January 2012 20:22:23 Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:43:35 -0500
> Juan Luis Baptiste <juancho at mageia.org>
> 
> wrote:
> > > 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?
> > 
> > Because as I said earlier, we backport the "commit" that fixes that
> > single issue, based on the info found on the bugzilla report of the
> > upstream project.
> 
> But how do you choose which patches you want to backport from the
> stream of bugfixes done by upstream?

Speaking for myself, and using openldap as an example:
1)I am active on the mailing lists (e.g. openldap-technical)
2)I am subscribed to the bugs mailing list (openldap-its)
3)I check commits in git for the OPENLDAP_REL_ENG_2_4 branch

Typically, if I see 'crasher' in the commimt, I'll look at using that patch 
for an update.

> Should the packager monitor all
> bug fixing activity? (sure (s)he *can*, but that's a lot of work)
> 
> Just because someone doesn't file a bug against Mageia doesn't mean the
> bug doesn't bother anybody, because many users don't report upstream
> bugs to the distro's tracker.
> (also, other users don't bother reporting bugs at all :-))

And this is the reason I would like to see backports, so I can:
1)Provide bugfix and security updates with no regressions, in updates
2)Provide latest upstream stable release in backports, so a user can 
conveniently contribute (e.g. bug reports) upstream.

But, note that pushing unwanted packages to 99% of our users is not a solution 
either, we don't want to be Fedora, where every month you effectively have a 
new distribution ...

Regards,
Buchan