What about the non-critical bugs?

[David Henningsson]

Patrick Goetz wrote:
>> Right now we deal with that situation mainly by letting our users search
>> around for a ppa where the bug is fixed. That's a little risky from a
>> security point of view, and perhaps not as user-friendly as we would
>> like. We also have backports, but AFAIK that's for releasing newer
>> versions, rather than fixing bugs.
> 
> Bug fixes are almost always released in newer versions (else how would 
> one distinguish between patched and pre-patched code?), so why wouldn't 
> $DISTRIB_CODENAME-backports be the right way to provide access to bug fixes?

Here's an example that illustrates the problem:

Suppose that lucid ships with package foo 3.0, and that lucid-backports
has released foo 3.1 (to give users new exciting features, and likely
some new bugs as well).

Foo 3.0 has a low-impact bug which a developer fixes. Now the fix can't
go into lucid-backports since that would interfere with the release of
foo 3.1, and it can't go into lucid-updates since "stable release
updates will, in general, only be issued in order to fix high-impact
bugs" [1].

// David

[1] Quote from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates