On 2026-09-25 3:20 AM, Richard W.M. Jones via devel wrote:
There are two approaches. The one I'm going to call the Good One (my
opinion) is that we build a coherent distribution with one version of
each package. Libraries are built with stable APIs and backwards
compatibility in mind.
Fedora doesn't develop most of those libraries, we distribute them. I
don't think it makes sense to maintain a build system that only works if
development is done the way we wish it were done.
The Bad One is we just chuck everything together and do what works,
without caring about the long term. This is certainly effective at
making something that works, but hides long term debt, including
serious security issues, which matters more than ever.
The idea that applications will lag and use old libraries is a common
objection, which is weird because the only project has has been
demonstrated with "upstream-release" branches needs them because they're
ahead of the distribution.
It's Fedora, today, that is using old versions, not decoupled applications.
I suspect that many people will dismiss that as insufficient evidence,
so I checked Rawhide recently:
https://github.com/gordonmessmer/rawhide-lag-tracker
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1axHOgq6LsODDmAA-D-C12StPs2jpI2Qq?usp=sharing
About 1/6 of packages in Rawhide are, in my opinion, significantly
behind upstream. Meaning they're on the current release series but more
than 3 patches behind, or they're not on the current release series at
all. Another 1/6 of packages don't have release-monitoring set up nor a
Url that references a VCS (which, I know, is not required) and are
difficult to check without manual work. So, somewhere between 1/6 and
1/3 of packages are lagging, in Rawhide.
If you are concerned about shipping old packages, then upstream-release
branching is the *solution*, not the problem.
The process we have in place today, where we try to build everything
around one release of every shared component, actually make it harder to
keep things up to date. They require more coordination than a system
that offers upstream-release branches. Shared components require extra
care to update because they might impact applications, and applications
sometimes can't be updated because the shared components aren't ready yet.
--
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