Re: [Evolution-hackers] bug fixing in stable 2.22.x branch

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

Hi,
I'm not speaking on behalf of Evo maintainers or distributors, just my
personal opinion.

Am Dienstag, den 19.08.2008, 18:41 +0200 schrieb Patrick Ohly:
> I have a question primarily to the maintainers of the various Linux
> distributions

...that would be the distributor-list (it's not really well-known).
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/distributor-list

>  which include Evolution 2.22.x (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian
> Lenny), but also to the Evolution hackers: the latest stable release,
> 2.22.3.1, still contains bugs.

So do the latest released $MODULE tarballs for GNOME 2.20 or GNOME
2.14...

>  There are different ways to deal with
> this:
>      1. Evolution upstream continues to apply bug fixes to the 2.22.x as
>         long as important distributions use that.

...and to 2.20 or 2.14 (remember Debian?).
Next problem: What is "important"?
For example, Ubuntu's 8.04 (GNOME 2.22) provides 3 years support for
desktop versions and 5 years for server versions. That means 2013, if
we'd continue with our versioning system (we won't), this would mean
working on GNOME 2.41 while still maintaining 2.22.

IMO it's up to the distros to decide on their business models. Don't
outsource the costs of additional support to upstream, please. :-)

>      2. Maintainers of packages apply patches locally, without or with
>         help by Evolution upstream. Upstream could help with bug
>         tracking.
> 
> What's the current practice? It seems that upstream has already stopped
> updating the 2.22 branch and bug fixes are only applied to trunk [1].

GNOME 2.22.3 was the last planned GNOME release. After that it doesn't
happen too often that maintainers (or distros) will ship another tarball
from SVN. Applying patches to stable branch too is often considered too
much work in SVN.
For very important GNOME issues I sometimes sent a list of bugs &
patches to the distributor-list (though I've become a bit lazy in the
last months due to work).

So from my point of view you either want to ask the evolution
maintainers for a 2.22.4 release, or ask the distributor-list to apply
the patches locally and ship package updates for their users.

I agree that the timezone bug you listed is important and should be
dealt with.

andre
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