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

Wed Jan 11 18:43:35 CET 2012

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Christian Lohmaier
+<lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com> wrote:
+> 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.
+>
+
+You don't do packaging, right ?
+
+it isn't that hard and is how all distro's do it. Look at Fedora or
+SuSE's packages and you will see a lot of patch files fixing single
+bugs. It's a matter of following upstream bugzilla reports and see
+which commit fixes the issue in question, create a patch from it and
+apply it to the package. Most of the time you can get the patches to
+fix single bugs from other distros packages.
+
+If there's a bugfix-only release it's better as it will be easier to
+update, but many times they aren't and include new features which
+could introduce regressions so we have to cherry pick those fixes.
+Also many times there isn't a new release from upstream so the only
+option we have is to backport a single fix.
+
+>> 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?
+>
+
+I think that what was meant here is that there are priorities for QA,
+where a security update is much more important and deserves more
+attention than a typo-fix. Of course, you are welcome to join the QA
+team to help them test those not so critical fixes if you really care
+that much about them.
+
+>
+> 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?
+>
+
+Because as I said earlier, we backport the "commit" that fixes that
+single issue, based on the info found on the bugzilla report of the
+upstream project. Also as you say most of the times upstream is not a
+bunch of clueless idiots so they will document very well each commit,
+making it easier for us to find those fixes.
+
+Cheers,
+
+-- 
+Juancho
+