Non-"critical" bug fixes/new hardware drivers in stable releases?

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Tim,

>  While I can see the
> merit of keeping changes to "stable" to a minimum, it seems like the
> existing policy of Ubuntu (and many distributions - I'm not blaming Ubuntu
> in particular) is leaving many users out in the cold with regards to their
> issues until the next release.

Backporting changes is risky. Ubuntu makes the decision that security
fixes are worth the risk of backporting. If you are talking about
changes that are available in later releases, then the affected users
are able to upgrade. In my opinion, it is more important that we don't
break the machines of people for whom everything is currently fine.

I would love to see Ubuntu backport all new features to past versions,
but that would leave little point in having releases at all. It would
make it nearly impossible to check quality as the system would be in
continual flux. In order to backport non-critical/security updates, we
would need people testing those updates - people who could be working
to make the next releases better. With limited resources, I think
system stability on past versions would suffer.

Aaron