Any planned change on backports policy?

[Ante Karamatić]

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 05:08 +0100, Martin Alderson wrote:

> It seems very weird to have to update your entire OS just to get a new
> release of, say, firefox or openoffice with a critical bug fixed in
> it.

That's not true. Openoffice.org2 and Firefox 1.1 aren't bugfixes. These
are new versions of package. If you change firefox/openoffice to newer
version, then it's most likely you will have to change gnome-vfs, and
that means you will have to change almost whole gnome, etc... 

> Obviously there is the issue of developer resources, but perhaps it
> would be possible to have 'last release' updates of select packages
> (Firefox and OpenOffice spring to mind as the most important).

This could be done unofficialy. If that is so important for you, you
could pay somone to do it for you. Don't forget that you have security
updates for Ubuntu packages for 18 months since distribution is out.

> While I commend your aggressive release policy, I feel it's going to
> be very hard for some users to change to Ubuntu when it's nearly
> impossible to get official updates even for the most current release.
> For example, when Firefox 1.1 comes out in June/July, it will still be
> 3-4 months before Breezy is ready. I feel many users will get
> incredibly frustrated at watching their Windows and Mac friends use
> all the latest wizz-bang features and them stuck on 1.0, and then
> having to face the same problem with Firefox 1.5 which is probably
> going to come out just after Breezy - 5 months of being at least a
> version behind for Breezy users.

Well, they should then do what their friends with Mac and Windows did -
download Firefox/OOorg from getfirefox.com/openoffice.org. Firefox
doesn't come with Windows/OSX. You don't get IE7 for Windows 2000,
neither Tiger's Safari in Panther, etc.

-- 
Ante Karamatic|--|ivoks(@)grad.hr|--|PGP: D3BDA225
http://master.grad.hr/~ivoks/|--|ICQ: 64631782
May, 15. <herve> we're fixing the universe, it's not an easy duty!