On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:23:44 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
This policy isn't very helpful to those who haven't upgraded to 11.1. We might just as well be on a continuous upgrade cycle every 8 months (based on the new release schedule).
Just like me, I'm using 11.0 >:-)
Common ground to build on. :-)
The "security patches only" was the old SuSE policy and it hasn't changed much, it is how things are, and there are reasons for it (1). There are exceptions. Big bugs have some chance of being solved, small ones few chances. I don't work at suse, so I don't know which.
I can appreciate that, but sometimes a little shake isn't a bad thing. :-) I do work for Novell myself (not as part of the group that handles Linux, though) as I've mentioned before.
If you want support, you are pointed to SLES.
Actually, the way it is, if you want community support, openSUSE is the way to go. If you want "professional" support, then something that comes with a support contract (SLES or SLED depending on need) is the way to go. I'm a home user with openSUSE. It's easy to say "go buy SLED", but that's not a desktop targeted at my market segment. openSUSE is. But I also don't think that discussion of backporting patches should be shut down with "if you want support, use SLE rather than openSUSE". That kinda says that the community support model doesn't work - but we all know that's not the case.
AFAIK, this problem affects few people in 11.0, most use 11.1; maybe there is some workaround. Marcus said he would have a look at it. Personally, as I'm not affected, I would prefer some other bug be attended to, hopefully some one that affects me! :-P
Could be, and as it doesn't affect me either (at this point), I'm not overly keen on a fix for it specifically - at least until I run into it. But the policy of not backporting patches for fairly serious issues - even as I mentioned with the gsynaptics bug I ran into that was fixed in 11.1 before 11.1 was released and originally was not going to be backported to 11.0 - even though it was the *current* release - seems just silly to me and worthy of discussion within the community. That way when a bug that's critical does hit me, my only solution isn't to use a community-contributed patch through OBS (which can create its own problems as many have noted in the discussions about 1-click installs and such) or to upgrade my entire distro and pray I don't break something like iFolder which isn't provided by openSUSE directly.
(1) Packages do not get upgraded to another version during a distro life cycle (which is another long standing policy
Yep, aware of that one. Currently using the unstable OO 3.x repo for that because OO is still on 2.x in 11.0. I'm fine with that.
(2)); instead, when there is a problem the solution is backported, and as this requires some work, it is done only if really necessary, which means, security problems only. With some exceptions.
Sure. This discussion came up with regards to another library update some months ago as well - a library that encfs depends on that broken encfs in 11.0. Again, fairly critical issue to those who use encfs because they couldn't get into their encrypted directories. I forget which dependency it was now that was broken - boost, I think - but encfs was completely broken when 11.0 shipped and the fix was originally only going to be put into 11.1 and not 11.0, even though it WAS totally broken in 11.0. To the team's credit, after much gnashing of teeth, the fixed boost package was put into the update channel. But IMHO it should have been obvious that forcing people to upgrade to the just-released 11.1 to fix a totally reproducible problem with encfs not working at all on 11.0 as shipped rather than providing a patch to the library that broke it was the right call, and it really shouldn't (again IMHO) taken the amount of pressure to get that patch backported to 11.0 given the severity of the issue. I used to be a RedHat user, and I certainly wouldn't go back after having been a SUSE user for the last 5-6 years (nor would I switch to another distro - that's not going to solve the problem with openSUSE either). I find the distro superior in every way over the others, and "threatening" to leave doesn't solve anything. I think people who do that are being pretty childish, actually - the "I'll take my ball and leave" tends to leave OSS communities (and others) thinking "gee, what a prick" and "good riddance to bad rubbish".
This is done to avoid incompatibilities between new or upgraded packages, it add stability to the distro. Upgrading a package can add new problems that are unknown and untested.
Sure, and I can appreciate the complexities of managing this as well.
And it has worked fine for a long time, believe me :-) Other distros may do it different, but this is one of the strengths of suse.
Sure, at the same time, wouldn't it be great if the strength could be maintained and we get critical issues fixed in currently supported releases? That'd be awesome. As a user of openSUSE, I accept that an update might break things for me. I hope it doesn't. But even more than that, I hope that when something's broken, I can get it fixed through 'official' channels, and if that fix breaks something else, I accept the responsibility to report that it caused a problem, what the problem is, and to provide as much detailed information as I can to get the problem fixed. If I was a hard- core coder, I'd probably contribute patches myself, but I generally don't trust my coding enough to do that. So instead I offer whatever I can to the developers who do write the fixes so they can fix the problems. That's my contribution to the process, and honestly I wish more users of openSUSE would take my approach rather than just "yell and forget about it" when they run into a problem. As a user of the product, I'm a member of the community and I want to give back in any way I am able to. That's how we make a better product, right? Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org