Re: Upstream "stable" branches and Debian freeze
Thijs Kinkhorst writes ("Re: Upstream "stable" branches and Debian freeze"):
> In the past such things have not been allowed with the argumentation that
> even though stable may contain bugs, users rely on the behaviour that
> stable has. They may know about a bug but may have worked around it (and
> the update may break the workaround) or they do not know about a bug but a
> fix for it may break a previously functional system. And of course as we
> all know: bugfixes are not zero-risk and do have chances on new bugs being
> introduced.
Basically this argument is "the update may break things".
That's true, but the right questions are: how likely is that; how bad
are the bugs that would be fixed by the update; and so on.
> Being completely bug-free would be nice, but is probably unachievable. I
> think there's something to say for the predictability of a release: it may
> not be perfect, but once installed and tested it will keep working.
This argument seems very absolutist and would seem to suggest we
should never do any stable release updates at all. But a user who
wants that level of stability can simply not take the stable release
updates, and only apply the security updates.
I think there is room for us relaxing our policy for stable updates.
Where upstream have a good track record of not breaking their own
stable branch, I think providing those updates to our users is
probably sensible.
Ian.
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