Bug fixes of released packages (was Re: GNOME 0.27 is released )

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

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On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Kenth Christiansen wrote:

> To: GNOME Malinglist <gnome-list@gnome.org>,
>     Nelson Minar <nelson@media.mit.edu>
> Subject: Re: GNOME 0.27 is released 
> From: Kenth Christiansen <kenth@writeme.com>
> 
> 
> Can't agree more, but we also need to release new releases fairly often to keep people excited.
> 
> Daleak
> 
> >There's a lot of excitement about GNOME, people want to use it. It
> >should be possible to harnass that and promote the project, but it
> >does require more work making interim releases.

Well, I thing in future we should also make more often bugfixes to already
released packages.

This is not so much work it may look like - package maintainers should tag
the module in CVS whenever they make a stable release (as they already
do).

But then, when bug reports arrive, we should not simply tell people ``this
has already been fixed in CVS'' - for instance gnome-core-0.28/gmenu
requires a more recent gtk+ than the latest that has been released as RPM
and so on.

In such cases, we should better fix the bug in CVS, make a diff against
the tag of the released module and upload this patch to the GNOME ftp
site.

We can then tell people ``fetch the patch and the new SPEC file from the
GNOME ftp site and rebuild your RPM - the problem will then be solved.''

This will make people more happy than waiting for a new release which will
break other stuff.

And - already ``real stable releases'' contain bugs - just look at the
GNOME Bug Tracking system - there are lots of bug reports about things
that have already been fixed in CVS but do not work in gnome 0.20.

Nobody needs to make new source and binary RPMS each time something is
fixed in CVS, making the required patches will be enough.

People can't do this themselves - you can't tell a newbie to link the
current CVS version of gnome-libs with the RPMS from the GNOME ftp site -
all you'll get is a bug report about a non-working `gmenu' subdir ...

Martin

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   Martin Baulig - Angewandte Mathematik - Universitaet Trier

   baulig@castor.uni-trier.de, http://www.home-of-linux.org/
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