[Mageia-dev] Question about backports: calibre (bug 1659)

Tue Jun 14 19:27:33 CEST 2011

+
+> Would this 'backports' repository section sound better to you if it is 
+> renamed e.g. to 'rolling' ? (:
+
+No, backports sounds very bad, except maybe for people coming from Mandriva. They (you!) must love the concept.
+
+(Oh, maybe "trolling" instead of "rolling" :-))
+
+Let me put it this way. People coming from Windows have this mind set:
+-- when I am using a release the OS called Windows XP, the system in itself gets minor updates: SP1, SP2, SP3. I therefore expect a release of a Linux distro to update KDE 4.6 to 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.6.3, 4.6.4... Now, KDE 4.8 would be more like upgrading XP to Vista so _no_, this should _not_ go into "updates".
+-- when I am using Windows XP, applications that don't need newer libraries, like Calibre, can be updated as they are released. I don't need a new release of the OS to update such an application! (And no, it's _not_ "backported" from Vista or Win7!) So why is this impossible in Linux? (Of course, when Calibre will need a newer Python , it would be a different matter, but this is not the case yet.)
+
+
+Nwo, in Windows it's easy to downgrade in case of significant regressions.
+Everyone can do that. Not that easy in Linux though. If I remember correctly
+from the times when I was using Synaptic with Ubuntu, it was possible from a
+menu to choose, for each package, what version to install -- this way,
+downgrades were easy. Mandriva does not offer such a possibility. Either way, knowing that some major distros released with Linux _kernels_ that
+brought major regressions, and that _ALL_ the distros release every now and
+then X.Org with Intel/Nvidia/ATI drivers that _break_ (i.e. major regressions),
+I feel that so much fuss for a "leaf" application (that only breaks some
+features from itself, when this happens) is... too much fuss.
+
+R-C
+