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Lack of policy for qualification for update, and no backports repo?Lack of policy for qualification for update, and no backports repo?Posted Mar 11, 2010 13:42 UTC (Thu) by buchanmilne (guest, #42315)Parent article: Who is Fedora for? I think the problem here is that Fedora is trying to accomplish two different goals with the same repo:
Of course, sometimes the lines get blurred, but the QA/vetting process for non-security updates should be sufficient going as updates, and packages that don't pass or get sufficient testing should not be shipped as updates. I note that in Mandriva, updates is reserved for bugfix and security updates. The contrib repo is not QA'ed though, so security updates for contrib can go directly (submitted to build system and immediately after successful build and any automated test directly to primary mirrors) to contrib/updates, while updates for main must go to main/testing before being QA'ed by the QA team. On successful tests, the package will be moved to main/updates. For new versions, there is the backports repo (which also allows introducing packages which did not exist in the distro when released), so for example amarok 2.2.2, gimp 2.6.0, thunderbird 3.0.x, openldap 2.4.21, xen 3.4.2 etc. are available there (in main/backports). contrib/backports has things like gcompris 9.2, gpodder 2.2, kernel 2.6.32.1 koffice 2.1.0, monodevelop 2.2, nexuiz 2.5.2, playonlinux 3.7.3, psi 0.14, qgis 1.3.0, vlc 1.0.5 xbmc 9.11. However, KDE 4.4.x is not available in any Mandriva stable repo, only in "cooker", which is what you run if you want bleeding edge. KDE 4.4.0 is available in a KDE repo (packaged by the Mandriva KDE maintainer). Then again, what percentage of fedora users actually run rawhide (compared to those that run, say, Mandriva cooker). This arrangement allows people who want mostly stable with updates but some new versions to get automatic updates from the "updates" repos, and choose updates from backports, without subjecting everyone to the most aggressive updates available. It also allows contributors to get new packages out to users without too much effort and bureaucracy.
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Lack of policy for qualification for update, and no backports repo? Posted Mar 15, 2010 17:20 UTC (Mon) by AdamW (guest, #48457) [Link]
Hey, Buchan. I already put a few notes about the MDV process into the Fedora thread.
The main drawback to it is that it does come with a penalty of extra overhead on the infrastructure and development groups. It was a fairly obvious choice for Mandriva, which has a clear focus on accommodating as many regular end-users as possible, but it's not so obvious for Fedora, whose goals are not quite so evident. It's not clear that what Fedora actually wants to do is to make the lives of regular consumer users as easy as possible. If Fedora is focused more on aiding the development of Linux technologies, it may not make sense to spend resources on dual-stream updates. As the article says, it's a question that's not been settled yet.
BTW, KDE isn't in /backports because of the backports policy restriction which heavily discourages the updating of shared libraries in /backports, I believe.
Lack of policy for qualification for update, and no backports repo? Posted Mar 18, 2010 8:44 UTC (Thu) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
If the outcome of this is that Fedoras goal is not to make the life of its
users easier then that should be printed in BIG letters on every Fedora webpage so that no more potential Linux users try it and get the fairly certain bad experience.
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