On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 3:37 PM Kevin P. Fleming kpfleming@redhat.com wrote:
This week my F36 system got upgraded to Emacs version 28, so it's already in F36. How is that possible?
It's possible because we generally rely on packagers to Do The Right Thing™. There aren't technical restrictions like in some of our enterprise-oriented downstream distros. Policy[1] says "we should avoid major updates of packages within a stable release". In practice, maintainers will make major version bumps because 1. upstream doesn't have a clear major/minor release numbering scheme, 2. it's easier on the packager, and/or 3. they don't believe it introduces incompatibilities.
In this particular case, since the update[2] got sufficient karma, there was nothing to stop it. This is a good opportunity to remind all of us to avoid major version bumps in stable releases where possible. Packagers running with updates-testing enabled might help catch some of these things as well, although there are disadvantages to that, too.
As Dan mentioned in a reply, adding some gating tests to catch the specific breakages here will help prevent this in the future. If you want to add CI gating to your packages, see the CI docs[3].
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Updates_Policy/#stable-releases [2] https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2022-d75f0c2a4a [3] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ci/gating/