Re: Stable .3 releases

[Loïc Minier <lool+gnome via ecp fr>]

        Hi,

On Wed, Jan 24, 2007, Vincent Untz wrote:
> I know they are for Debian, but one could argue that Debian stable is
> using a really old version anyway (it's 2.8.3 right now ;-)).

 Yes, and we already miss plenty of fixes after the .3 releases.  If you
 ask me, you should have longer supported releases.  I understand you
 can not push a release out every 6 months and support it for 3 years,
 but on the other hand the current situation where as soon as the next
 GNOME stable release is out all people running the preceding one get
 little support for it is unconfortable.

 We workaround this by pulling patches from upstream, or by mixing
 versions such as shipping GNOME 2.14 with Totem and Vino 2.16 (these
 are just examples).

 I don't have a magic wand to solve this; the only thing which springs
 to my mind is the concept of long-term supported releases such as
 Ubuntu Dapper, but I'm not sure Debian would be able to align on these
 releases as the Debian release cycle is not particularly aligned on
 GNOME's, nor is it regular.


 The Debian GNOME team lacks man power, and we're not after the bleeding
 edge anyway, so we generally start looking at releases in the .9x
 versions, past the feature / API freezes or so, but we rarely make it
 to ship the .0 stable desktop when it releases; completion of a stable
 desktop usually happens when you're pushing .1 or .2 packages.

 In this context, .3 releases and later are very valuable to us, and I
 would even be very happy if some maintainer could backport very
 important bug fixes to older stable GNOME releases.

   Bye,
-- 
Loïc Minier <lool dooz org>