Re: Release management problems

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2014-02-07 at 10:44 -0500, Pavel Simerda wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Bastien Nocera" <hadess hadess net>
> > To: networkmanager-list gnome org
> > Sent: Friday, February 7, 2014 9:24:16 AM
> > Subject: Release management problems
> >
> > Heya,
> >
> > We're running into trouble with the recent "Team" support in GNOME, as
> > there's no backing NetworkManager release with the necessary team
> > support:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723769
> >
> > It wouldn't be that much of a problem if Fedora didn't ship git
> > snapshots of the "next" NetworkManager version. Why ship git snapshots
> > in Fedora that are apparently not good enough for full releases? Could
> > upstream not do with testing on more than Fedora?
>
> Sounds like a request for the Fedora NetworkManager package rather
> than upstream. As I understand it, the Fedora maintainers (while being
> NM upstream developers as well) want to keep up with the current
> upstream development and at the same time the current upstream
> development is so much ahead of the latest upstream release.

But it's good enough to go in Fedora stable releases, but not as
releases for all distributions to use? I don't understand that.

>  That could improve when the 0.9.10 release is ready.

We already had the same problem 6 months ago with 0.9.8.

>  You, if I understand correctly, would prefer to only include upstream
> NetworkManager final releases to Fedora just to help
> gnome-control-center developers keep their software compatible with
> the latest NM release.

I would prefer releases to be made for all distributions, or even
better, something that syncs up with GNOME releases.

> I wonder whether such a rationale is a generally accepted one in
> Fedora. There's NetworkManager developer documentation for the
> released version to keep using only features existing in that release.
> I guess there are also non-Fedora Gnome developers who could easily do
> the pre-release gnome-control-center testing to ensure it can be
> compiled and used on a system with a released version of
> NetworkManager.

As mentioned in the mail to Dan, something like GLIB_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED
would be useful to avoid this sort of problems, at least from the "does
it compile" stand-point. I don't expect NM to grow the same sort of
"shield" for its D-Bus APIs that we might be using, but for the
front-ends to degrade gracefully should it happen.

Cheers