On 4/20/21 1:48 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > I think it's reasonable to expect from a distribution that they > backport upstream fixes, at least in Debian, openSUSE and Fedora, it > isn't a problem.
I think it is unreasonable -- backporting upstream fixes is a sign that upstream software has failed to be usable out of the box, and needs to release more often. If a distro is being *forced* to backport 200+ patches, we've officially entered the Madness Place: https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/Base:System/grub2/grub2.spec lines 174 - 395 (9 pages of source files, most named 0001?) https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/grub2/tree/rawhide carefully numbered list of patches 0001 - 0198 https://salsa.debian.org/grub-team/grub/-/blob/master/debian/patches/series patch series of 219 patches ... I'm sorry? Claiming that distros "are capable of backporting, therefore it's reasonable to expect it is their job to do so" is completely missing the point. Claiming that for these distros "it isn't a problem" to roll a patchset for elaborate backport lists, based on I guess the evidence that they've done so, unjustly conflates "we like doing this" with "we were forced to do this with much gnashing of teeth". I can't point to citations where either one has been said, but I somehow doubt the former viewpoint is the one distro maintainers are holding. (Well, I'm given to understand Debian maintainers seem to actively enjoy having many patches. So I guess I shouldn't be *too* surprised that a Debian Developer is insisting that people maintain downstream patches.) "Basically insulting except not outright" a person who would like to see more frequent (read: any) maintenance releases because I dunno, clearly they're just irresponsible at running a distro if they're afraid of importing 200 patches in one go, is kind of really bad. This is a real problem that grub really has. Whyever that might be a problem (the standard reason is lack of developer time) can be seen as forgivable, because software development is hard and all too often unrewarding, and demanding more releases may not actually be feasible in practice. But I'd really, really, really like to NOT see victim blaming and holding the current state of affairs as some kind of joyous ideal which must be held sacred, because pooh-pooh anyone who dares post to the list merely asking if such a thing might be possible -- it's your own darned job, noob, stop being unreasonable and lern2patch, reasonable distros will reasonably patch. (I think it bears mentioning again -- 200+ patches. *200*. At what point is there more patches than source code?) ... Anyway, a grub 2.04.1 would have been fantastic 6 months or a year ago. At this point, people should just use 2.06-rc1, there is not much point in trying to stabilize a maintenance release in the middle of the freeze/RC cycle for 2.06 as the same effort is better spent getting 2.06 out the door. But I'm pretty sure there have been previous threads discussing the hope of maintenance releases, and a tentative statement by the project maintainers that they will try to do so going forward. So hopefully the situation will be better going forward. -- Eli Schwartz Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User
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