[Mageia-dev] Backports policy clarification (and discussion)

[nicolas vigier]

On Fri, 08 Jun 2012, Samuel Verschelde wrote:

> 
> Maybe we shouldn't open backports for Mageia 1, and make sure upgrade to 
> Mageia 3 can take backports from Mageia 2 into account so that backports to 
> Mageia 2 are not stopped when Mageia 3 is released. Then we'll be safe.

I think we cannot have both :
- backports with higher version than in next stable release
- easy upgrade to next stable release

We can only have one in this list, so I think we need to decide which
one we want to keep.

In my opinion, freezing backports of distribution N-1 when distribution
N is released is a serious limitation and we should not do this. Instead
I would say that easy upgrade when using new backports after release of
distribution N+1 is not guaranteed (but should still work in many cases).

Then users can decide to :
- not use backports if they plan to do an upgrade later and avoid any
  potential problem
- use backports, and do a reinstall instead of an upgrade
- use backports, do an upgrade, and know that in some case a few
  packages may need to be manually reinstalled. But there still
  shouldn't be important problems in most cases.

We can provide a tool to list installed packages that are more recent
than version available in repository. This list can help to know which
packages may need to be reinstalled. But we don't know whether user
wants to revert to release or updates repository version, or use the
latest backports version.