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

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday 31 August 2007 20:27, Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
> 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.
>
This is what we have *-backports for.  Each package gets at least minimal 
testing before it's approved for packporting.  I don't recommend activating 
the backports repository for your release and installing everything, but for 
selected packages it can be very useful.

Scott K