Distributions going smart & bugfixes?

[Axel Thimm]

Hi,

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 01:00:29AM -0200, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> Hello Alex,
> 
> I hope you've had a terrific year crossover.

Thanks, best wishes to all of you for the year to come^W^Wthat
came. :)

> (...)
> > Can we find a way in between? A branch were critical bugfixes are
> > allowed to be made on stable code (e.g. non trunk)? This service
> > is/was invaluable to us simple distribution supporters. Otherwise we
> > would need to wade through all the known bugs to see whether there is
> > already a patch attached or not.
> 
> Of course I can't prevent people from fixing their problems on their
> own branches, and publishing that for other users.  Actually, that's
> the beauty of open source.  The only comment I made is that this
> branch is *not* what will become Smart version 1.X.Y.  The next
> version of Smart will come out of trunk, and will contain changes
> reviewed and unittested.

OK, we (and with "we" I mean packagers for distributions) could very
well live with such a model - no (sub)minor releases, but a
semi-official branch to pull hot fixes from. I just don't want to see
Anders demotivated as w/o his collection of fixes in that branch
Fedora 10 users would still not be able to do much with smart and it
would lose some of its fan base.

And even if it is open source, if there is no blessing by the
authorbase people won't go ahead, that's why I'm trying to get you
convinced that this is a good thing. :)

> Anders has been doing an amazing job on these branches and on pushing
> these fixes forward, and I want to fully support him on integrating
> these changes on trunk, even if I have to write the tests myself (as I
> have been doing with the little time I'm able to dedicate).  I'm
> hoping to work with Anders so that he can produce more changes which
> are properly unittested and ready to go, so that I can get out of the
> way and become less of a bottleneck.

I understand the different momenta here. All I want is for smart to
grow more into the hearts of Fedora/RHEL users. I myself am waiting
for some very nice features (reading yum configs, mirrorlist, applets
etc.), that will make smart a first class depsolver again in
Fedora-land, and the energy for getting these is working on trunk, of
course, but I don't want to lose the established user base by
regressions in the latest distribution releases.

Maybe an author-blessed hotbugfixes branch that supports the latest
official smart release to overcome (only) severe bugs? This currently
affects Fedora, but maybe the next Ubuntu/Mandriva/etc. release also
needs some very quick reaction that would find a platform there.

Thanks!
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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