[Mageia-dev] Proposal of a backporting process

Wed Jun 29 15:37:33 CEST 2011

Le mercredi 29 juin 2011 à 10:56 +0200, Angelo Naselli a écrit :
+> mercoledì 29 giugno 2011 alle 00:23, andre999 ha scritto:
+> > A leaf package is a package that is not required by any other package.
+> > But leaf packages will always require something else.
+> > If B requires A, then A is not a leaf package, even though B could be.
+> > When backporting B, we test to make sure that it works with release A.
+> > Obviously it restricts what can be backported, but the trade-off is that backports will 
+> > (almost always) work, and they won't break anything.
+> 
+> Well my point is i often backport something for my job (for the most
+> commoncpp2 now, ucommon in future), and since they are libraries i can fall
+> in errors. I always tested before backporting though, and i haven't had any problems
+> upgrading, but that's me and i could have been lucky.
+>
+> If we can accept some exceptions from time to time, but proved (bug open, testing
+> and updates/backports etc) i can think to have mageia not only at home or in a virtual
+> box. Otherwise i can't see the need of backports, for me of course.
+
+If we start to add exception while we do not even have started to agree
+on the general case, we are never gonna go anywhere :)
+
+I have the impression that everybody want to be able at the same time to
+backport anything, and yet expect to have the same level of support and
+quality, and without using any more ressources. 
+
+Technically, anything could be backported with proper tests. After all,
+that's roughly the process we use for cauldron ( ie, take a new version
+of software, compile it on the distribution, and build later others
+software against that ).
+
+Every software have someone interested, from low level like kernel
+( backported on kernel-linus, asked by people as seen on MIB ), or gcc
+( gcc 4.6 being my main motivation for keeping a cooker installation )
+to higher level like gajim or midori. The only thing that no one would
+be interested is stuff that do not move ( at, linpng, etc ), ie
+everything were there is no new features, and working fine. And even,
+people could want to have a new feature, such as systemd, etc.
+
+So in the end, if we want to satisfy everybody, the answer is to have no
+policy forbidding anything and just say "do proper amount of QA". That's
+fine by me ( especially since I do not use backports ), but we have to
+agree on that.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+