[Mageia-dev] Backports policy clarification (and discussion)

Tue Jun 12 20:12:02 CEST 2012

On Fri, 08 Jun 2012, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
+
+> 
+> Maybe we shouldn't open backports for Mageia 1, and make sure upgrade to 
+> Mageia 3 can take backports from Mageia 2 into account so that backports to 
+> Mageia 2 are not stopped when Mageia 3 is released. Then we'll be safe.
+
+I think we cannot have both :
+- backports with higher version than in next stable release
+- easy upgrade to next stable release
+
+We can only have one in this list, so I think we need to decide which
+one we want to keep.
+
+In my opinion, freezing backports of distribution N-1 when distribution
+N is released is a serious limitation and we should not do this. Instead
+I would say that easy upgrade when using new backports after release of
+distribution N+1 is not guaranteed (but should still work in many cases).
+
+Then users can decide to :
+- not use backports if they plan to do an upgrade later and avoid any
+  potential problem
+- use backports, and do a reinstall instead of an upgrade
+- use backports, do an upgrade, and know that in some case a few
+  packages may need to be manually reinstalled. But there still
+  shouldn't be important problems in most cases.
+
+We can provide a tool to list installed packages that are more recent
+than version available in repository. This list can help to know which
+packages may need to be reinstalled. But we don't know whether user
+wants to revert to release or updates repository version, or use the
+latest backports version.
+
+