nicolas vigier a écrit :
On Fri, 08 Jun 2012, Samuel Verschelde wrote:
Maybe we shouldn't open backports for Mageia 1, and make sure upgrade to
Mageia 3 can take backports from Mageia 2 into account so that backports to
Mageia 2 are not stopped when Mageia 3 is released. Then we'll be safe.
I think we cannot have both :
- backports with higher version than in next stable release
- easy upgrade to next stable release
Why not ?
We would have to ensure that the version of the backport is less than or
equal to the version of the package (backport or not) in the next stable
release. We just have to follow the versioning policy of updates c.f.
Cauldron, i.e. an update always has a version less than cauldron.
(Which allows for adding updates without changing the version of the
next release.)
We would also have to ensure that the requires of the backport would be
available in the next stable release, which would be somewhat trickier,
but doable. (In most cases this would not be a problem.)
I think that we should fine-tune the rules so that we have both. (Thus
restricting how we define the requires, etc, and also restricting what
can be backported in some cases.)
Note that there are already some (loosely defined) restrictions on what
can be backported.
Maybe we should have a group which approves backports (including the
spec file), based on upgradability and other criteria. Especially in
the beginning, when the details will be less well-defined and packagers
less experienced with backports. Something like what we did for
exceptions to the version freeze for mga2. (Maybe approval by one of
the packager team leaders ? ;-) )
We could make that a requirement for moving from backports-testing to
backports.
We can only have one in this list, so I think we need to decide which
one we want to keep.
In my opinion, freezing backports of distribution N-1 when distribution
N is released is a serious limitation and we should not do this. Instead
I would say that easy upgrade when using new backports after release of
distribution N+1 is not guaranteed (but should still work in many cases).
Agreed about not denying backports for N-1 releases.
Then users can decide to :
- not use backports if they plan to do an upgrade later and avoid any
potential problem
- use backports, and do a reinstall instead of an upgrade
- use backports, do an upgrade, and know that in some case a few
packages may need to be manually reinstalled. But there still
shouldn't be important problems in most cases.
We can provide a tool to list installed packages that are more recent
than version available in repository. This list can help to know which
packages may need to be reinstalled. But we don't know whether user
wants to revert to release or updates repository version, or use the
latest backports version.
--
André
