On Thu, 2010-09-23 at 03:42 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
I think Kevin's proposal is written fairly with the given
information.
Still, I believe that the stable update guide needs to be relaxed for
software that doesn't affect anything other than itself. There are
single library packages that are not used by any applications, or used
by at most 1 application. The API/ABI change in a stable release
wouldn't break anything for such libraries.
I think if we're talking "stable releases", we can't be narrow-minded
about who could be impacted by an update. If a library package has no
actual users in Fedora (I maintain such a package!) that doesn't mean
no-one uses it: people will probably have compiled software against it
at some point.
ABI breaks are asking for trouble at the best of times, we've seen how
that can break Fedora-packaged software - but it can also break software
people have on their machines. The same applies to APIs too, if software
isn't compiled: PHP changes function behaviour surprisingly often, and
if that was updated and broke (for example) Wordpress, that would be
bad.
I'm not against people breaking A[BP]Is in stable releases, but I think
you need to have a really excellent reason to do it.
Cheers
Alex.
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