Re: Old versions of GNOME [was: Re: gtk 2.8 for gnome 2.12]

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Federico,

On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 22:58 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> I work in the desktop team at Novell, and a large part of my work
> consists of maintaining NLD 9, which uses GNOME 2.6.  When a bug comes
> in for that version, my life becomes a little hell of trawling old bug
> reports in bugzilla.gnome.org, correlating them with CVS commits (and
> Bonsai doesn't work), asking my friends who work for other distros
> whether they have fixes for the bug already...

	I know exactly what you're talking about but ... that's what we get
paid for. Boo-hoo to us, really :-)

> No one ever does a last tarball for foomodule-2.8.8.  Thus, the "last"
> fixes in the foomodule-2-8 branch are effectively lost, since
> distributors can only package the latest tarball.
>	
> All distros have packages with a "update-to-latest-in-branch.diff"
> patch.  If that last tarball existed, distros would save a lot of
> time.

	I don't think tarballs releases from old stable branches would help -
much, anyway. From my experience in both Sun and Red Hat, you generally
only want to include (in updates to your stable, supported product)
fixes for bugs which are serious, reported by a customer and don't
introduce significant risk of de-stabilising the product.

	That's good risk management. Shipping tarball releases of a
"free-for-all" stable branch wouldn't be good risk management.

Cheers,
Mark.