Documentation updates in-cycle?

[Tollef Fog Heen]

* Matthew East 

| 1. the risk of introducing new bugs - it's possible to introduce real
| bugs, although I doubt they would be that serious - for example, you
| might write some invalid markup that results in scrollkeeper errors that
| end up in people's monthly cronjob error logs. I personally can't think
| of anything more serious than that (and even that would be quite
| difficult to do) but I'm not an expert with Ubuntu and I'm told that
| bugs can come from unexpected places;

Factual errors might pop up too, and in some cases you can get
applications to crash if they use strings from the documentation as
format strings.  We have had this problem in dpkg earlier where there
was an error in a Chinese translation causing dpkg to not work when
installing packages (if you were in said Chinese locale).

| My personal view is that *probably* when balancing all these things up,
| the bug would have to be high-impact before it justifies undertaking the
| process to fix it, which takes us back to the StableReleaseUpdates policy.
| 
| What do other people think? I'm cc:ing Tollef for his views.

FWIW, I agree with this; if you have updates which should really go
in, the procedure shouldn't block you from doing that.  At the same
time, a released distro should not change in substantial ways, it
should only receive critical fixes, something I believe applies to
security as well.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are