Re: Why back-porting patches to stable instead of releasing a newpackage.
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 02:30:28PM +0100, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> writes:
> > If you start asking you will likely find more than thousand packages
> > where someone will have a good reason for an update of the package
> > in Debian 3.0. If only every 10th of these updates introduces a new
> > bug (IMHO a conservative estimation) these packages will bring 100
> > new bugs into _a released stable_.
>
> Just an observation, but if every one of those changes actually fixed
> a bug, that'd still be a reduction of 900 bugs. (How you ensure this
> happens is another kettle of fish entirely.)
You miss one point:
There's a big difference between major and bug-fix releases.
If you are a system administrator and you want to swith to a new major
release of Debian (e.g. 2.2 -> 3.0) you usually test this release on one
test machine, and if there are some problems, you look for solutions or
workarounds before updating all machines.
This additional work is currently not needed that much for bug-fix
releases.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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