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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 09:24 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> 
> (2) Obviously  the distros want to include an incredibly minimal set
> of patches in their maintenance releases. But those releases also lag
> anywhere between months and years behind HEAD. Better collaborative
> 'enterprise' management of the stable branch after .1/.2 but *before*
> the enterprise releases would help everyone quite a bit, I think, and
> not jeopardize anyone's post-release patch management strategy.

Our current model is:

 - keep the latest HEAD GNOME in Fedora, do all development
   on HEAD

 - eventually ship a RHEL based on that

 - once RHEL is out, we can only fix bugs that a customer asks for,
   or that are really bad, or security; we can't roll forward to any 
   version that has bugfixes we can't prove a customer cares about, 
   even if all the fixes are perfectly sane. This rule is becoming
   stronger rather than weaker over the last couple years...

The only time we need to do much backporting these days is in the gap
between Fedora and the final RHEL shipment. i.e. if we ship a Fedora and
then branch RHEL and freeze it for a multi-month beta, there's time for
a moderate number of backported patches to build up. But this is a
once-per-2-years event.

I think you might be suggesting that this gap is where we should be
doing more upstream-based work. That may be true, but you'd only see Red
Hat involved in that every 3rd or 4th GNOME release, since the rest of
the time we're either backporting very small patches to already-released
RHEL (this is something like a dozen patches per quarter, perhaps, and
to totally fossilized GNOME versions) or working on HEAD in Fedora.

Havoc