[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

Thu Oct 7 18:25:50 CEST 2010

Le jeudi 7 octobre 2010 17:16:03, nicolas vigier a écrit :
+
+> 
+> And what makes you think end-users want new versions rather than
+> stability ?
+
+Well ... what about those sotwares whose new versions correct bugs but are not 
+available for users ? If they correct bugs i may conclude they are more stable 
+so they should be proposed to users. That's for the theory, in real life it is 
+very different. Let's take Digikam (yes i love this software, killing 
+application IMHO). When Mdv 2010 was released (11 months ago) it was 
+digikam-1.0.0-0.5.2mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm thought updates i can have 
+digikam-1.2.0-0.4mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm and thought backport 
+digikam-1.2.0-0.2mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm. So nice done, but what about digikam 
+1.3 released on june 2010 ? What about digikam 1.4 released on late august 
+2010 ? These versions add stability by correcting bugs (and if you report a 
+bug, the first advice is to update to 1.4 if digikam version used for reporting 
+bug is not 1.4)
+
+Digikam 1.4 is only available on Mdv 2010.1 as a backport not as an update.
+
+So my feeling is that there is not necessary a relation between new version 
+and unstability (ie new version is not stable). I could take the example of 
+Scribus which latest stable is 1.3.3.14 (so 15 updates correcting bugs since 
+1.3.3.0, releases which are purely bug fix release), no one would say that 
+1.3.3.14 is less stable than 1.3.3.3. 
+
+Developers are continuously improving their softwares, mainly by correcting 
+bugs and adding functionnalities (and they are doing this in the same release, 
+few exception, Scribus is one with a 4-years old branch updating with only bug 
+fixes) and they used their last release to work on, so if we want to collabore 
+efficiently upstream we should provide end-users latest stable versions so they 
+can use it and report bugs that will be useful for developers.
+
+-- 
+Olivier Méjean
+Président de l'Association des Utilisateurs Francophones de Mandriva Linux
+http://mandrivafr.org
+twitter : obagoom
+identi.ca : goom
+