Stable GNOME updates, how could be do better?

[Martin Pitt]

Hello Bryce,

Bryce Harrington [2009-07-29 10:09 -0700]:
> First, the developer time is pretty minimal.  Basically, most typically
> I'm just doing a s/karmic/jaunty/ and uploading to the ppa, or a
> fakesync of a debian release.  I might tweak a version in a control file
> or toss in a patch, but it's generally a very trivial amount of work.

Right, but that means that there is very little QA on those packages,
and thus users who enable it are pretty much entirely on their own.

If this PPA is described appropriately, and not prominently announced
as "you should enable this!!!", there's nothing wrong with it, of
course. I'm just a little afraid of people seeing it somewhere,
enabling it, breaking their boxes, and then blaming us. But of course
that's true for any PPA, so it's not specific to SRUs.

> Second, I'm not the only person maintaining it; since it's a PPA, I can
> enable people I trust (but who may not yet be core-dev) to do updates.

That's a fair point; it's a good way to get community-maintained
updates to stable releases.

>  > most users of that release either learned to live with its bugs and
>  > found workarounds, or have already left it for something else (be that
>  > a newer or older Ubuntu release, another Linux distro, or another OS).
> 
> I'd prefer users not feel the need to leave for something else (or at
> least, not have to switch from Ubuntu).  So if adding -updates enables
> even a small portion of our userbase to stay with us, it is a win.

Of course I don't like people having to leave Ubuntu. What I was
saying is that if someone managed to run a stable release with known
bugs for three (jaunty) or even nine (intrepid) months, the users
who experienced dramatic regressions already abandoned it looooong ago,
so there is little point in spending lots of effort for fixing small
bugs, and doing it won't actually help to bring back those users.

> Third, I find it really, really useful for testing purposes.

Absolutely, no question there.

Thanks!

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)