OLS: Shuttleworth on free software development

OLS: Shuttleworth on free software development

Posted Aug 1, 2008 15:59 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: OLS: Shuttleworth on free software development by NAR
Parent article: OLS: Shuttleworth on free software development

Any support for older releases shipped by packagers has to come from those packagers.

But I wonder that how many package maintainers are up to this task, especially with bigger software like OpenOffice...

Well, it's not the task you may be imagining. It's very little of debugging and writing code. Rather, it's tracking the fixes in the current release and backporting ones you need, and reproducing problems against the current release and reporting those upstream. So it's more of a user task than a developer task.

I think I may see Shuttleworth's point now. If upstream is going to stop maintaining Release N and start maintaining Release N+1, it's nice for downstream if it happens at the same time that downstream stops maintaining its package that includes Release N and starts maintaining one that includes N+1. That way, nobody has to maintain Release N.

If and only if all the upstream projects switch at the same time, it's possible for all the downstreams to pick that time to switch as well.

---

(Log in to post comments)

In theory you're right, in practice .. things may be different!
To fix an issue in zebra, I had to find myself the patch in quagga (a fork of zebra) and tell
the distribution (that we pay quite a lot for support) to integrate it.

Maybe other distribs are better, I don't know, but let's just say that I wasn't impressed by
this one.