[kde-community] RFC: Distribution outreach program

[Carsten Pfeiffer]

On Friday 29 January 2016 18:09:23 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:

> Maybe the speed of upgrading as such is not the actual point. What I care
> about is the speed with which bugfixes reach end users. If a distribution
> decides to backport all bugfixes from a new major release to theirs and does
> that job well, I'm fine with that.
> However we've seen in the past that some distros which won't ship the most
> recent release won't backport bugs fixed in it, either, leaving users with
> sometimes serious bugs for way too long. This is what should be avoided.
> 
> The same goes for dependencies: If a certain version of a dependency causes
> bugs with our software, it is the distribution's job to fix that situation,
> not ours. We should not have to work around outdated versions of something
> further down the stack.

I think the best results would be achieved if there was some kind of 
notification of important bugfixes and dependency updates. Similar to security 
notices could important fixes be sent to a certain mailinglist which 
distributors can subscribe to.

Ideally, the following information would be available for critical issues in 
bugzilla or phabricator
- the respective component
- a description of the issue
- the impact of the issue and the fix
- the affected versions
- the patches (per version)

A special tag ("critical", "important") on an issue could induce a 
notification mail with a link to the issue and a summary of it. Maybe the list 
should be manually moderated to prevent accidental postings.

Cheers
Carsten