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

Wed Jan 11 17:48:28 CET 2012

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Guillaume Rousse
+<guillomovitch at gmail.com> wrote:
+> Le 11/01/2012 16:09, Antoine Pitrou a écrit :
+>
+>> As a Mageia user I would expect Mageia to package significant *bugfix
+>> releases* and ship them in the updates for the stable distro.
+>
+> You'd rather read the current update policy, rather than expect blind
+> assertions:
+> https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Updates_policy
+
+Whoa - this is a rather stupid policy. (my opinion, yours obviously differs).
+"For the most part, an update should consist of a <bold>patched build
+of the same version</bold> of the package released with the
+distribution,"
+
+Welcome to distro-isolation, putting burden on maintainers, giving
+them all the reason to deny a reasonable request for a bugfix release
+because it just is too much work to hunt for a specific commit that
+fixed bug x.
+
+>> For example, it would be nice if an up-to-date Mageia 1 system had
+>> Python 2.7.2 rather than Python 2.7.1 (not a deal-breaker, of course,
+>> but nice). There's more than a hundred bug fixes between the two
+>> versions and I don't expect Mageia to have independently fixed many of
+>> these bugs.
+>
+> A bug may vary from a typo in a man page to a critical security update,
+
+And a typo-fix is not worthwhile to have?
+
+> which make the number of claimed bugfix a poor decision metric. A
+> non-regression ensurance would be a better one, but it's quite difficult to
+> assert.
+
+Don't assume all upstream projects are a bunch of clueless idiots.
+
+For upstream releases that have a clear version/release scheme, with
+micro releases being compatible bugfixes only, the above mentioned
+policy is completely nonsense, same for your fear of regressions, etc.
+
+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?
+
+Regressions have the nice habit of being triggered by changes in
+apparently unrelated code...
+
+My 0.02€ only, but I strongly suggest for that update policy to be clarified.
+When there is no dedicated bugfix release procedure in the upstream
+package, an update is a rebuild of the same version with a
+corresponding patch. That's reasonable (as opposed to using a newer
+minor or even major release, those are backports).
+But once again: if upstream has a major.minor.micro scheme with micro
+versions being bugfix releases, I really don't see any sane reason for
+not "allowing" those updates.
+
+ciao
+Christian
+