[PlanetCCRMA] New Fedora updates policy and what it means for us

[Orcan Ogetbil]

Hi all,

Fedora steering committee (FESCo) came to a final decision about the
updates policy which is effective now. While it has many restrictions
for updates that we won't like, it is not as bad as we feared.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Updates_Policy

A couple of headliners that I need to stress:

- An update to a stable release of Fedora (12 and 13 for the time
being) MUST go to updates-testing repo. It has to stay there one week
at least. If it gets +3 karma, OR if it get +(1+1) karma where one of
those +1s is given by a proventester, he package is pushed to stable
(the updates repo). Since I usually keep stuff in updates-testing,
this is not a big problem for us.

- Package maintainers MUST:

    * Avoid Major version updates, ABI breakage or API changes if at
all possible.
    * Avoid changing the user experience if at all possible.
    * Avoid updates that are trivial or don't affect any Fedora users

This means that no major bumps in software in stable Fedora releases.
For instance, the rosegarden 1.7.3 to 10.02 jump will not happen
again. Libraries cannot be updated, e.g. Fedora 12 must stay with the
old redland*.

FESCo does not want people to learn user interfaces in the middle of a
release. i.e. a command line program cannot change its flags, a
graphical program cannot move its menu items, checkboxes around etc.

Fortunately, they open us a window for requesting exceptions. As an
example the KDE team was granted an exception of bumping 1 major
release in a stable Fedora release. KDE4.5 and 4.6 will be in Fedora
14. But 4.7 will not be.

Therefore in case you need some major update badly, please file a bug
in bugzilla.redhat.com , yell, explain why this must be updated, so
that when I or other packagers go to FESCo, we have some solid
evidence in our hands.

Cheers,
Orcan

* We tried really bad to convince OpenOffice.org people for updating
redland in F-12. The old version was not suitable for many audio
applications. They did not change their mind. With the new policy this
became even harder to do.