stormi wrote:Point releases must be supported for bugfixes too, not only security. Otherwise, the only way to have bugfixes for a given package would be to switch your entire system to a rolling version.
However, your proposal looks like a maintainer's nightmare to me. With 10 times more packagers and testers, maybe we could achieve it, but it doesn't look realistic given our current ressources.
At the same time, a maintainer would have to support a given package in : Unstable, Rolling Unstable, Rolling Stable, Point release 1, Point release 2, Point release 3, LTS release 1, LTS release 2 (for the periods where to LTS releases overlap to ease transition). Which means you have to run up to 8 different systems to be able to reproduce reported bugs, test your updates, etc. I'm not sure it would scale. I don't think we can have realistically at the same time a stable rolling release and point releases that are supported.
Your right, bugfixes in point releases.
The maintainers nightmare thing I don't see here. All maintainer of X package needs to do is make sure that package makes it into unstable, then release maintainers can push these packages down the line. So longer termed support releases would have older versions of packages (well tested) while more bleeding edge has newer.
1 package manager for upstream
2 packages are maintained by package manager until stable (while in unstable)
3 separate release maintainers work the packages down the line which are then stable
So we have a small community of people who represent the rolling unstable and so on and pull the packages from upstream into their version they are responsible for.
For bug fixes/security fixes, package maintainer could have releases in the repo like:
/blah/blah/unstable (general release)
/blah/blah/security (security updates)
/blah/blah/bugfixes (in the name)
Seems easy to me?
EDIT: Had a thought. Think of it like a giant filter, packages that go into unstable are just that unstable (until proven stable). Packages that would make it all the way down to LTS would bve rock solid and all the junk would be filtered out. Just random thought to add.