Like Murray I’m getting increasingly annoyed with ubuntu’s update policy. The whole idea of not shipping fixes for current breakage out of fear that this may cause new breakage is just lame IMO. You could at least look at what’s been fixed in the stable releases and do a risk analysis instead of just saying nay to everything.
Gnome-games
Ubuntu is shipping version 2.20.1 of gnome-games in gutsy. Lots of bugs has been fixed since that version and among these some frequent (seemingly ubuntu-specific) crashers. The update policy of ubuntu means that fixes for these does not reach the users. I guess the frequent crashers might fall under the category “severe regression” and I could file a SRU report and convince ubuntu to include that patch though.
For hardy ubuntu is shipping version 2.20.0.1. That’s right, a version older than what you get in gutsy. This is because gnome-games now depend on GGZ and before they can ship a 2.21.x version, GGZ must first be included in main. And for this to happen a MIR report must be filed.
So, the “stable” version is crashing and the unstable is not getting any testing. And unless something happens soon they will either be shipping an old version for hardy or a so-far-untested version – that they will of course _not_ provide fixes for later… Something is clearly broken in this process.
“just file the damn reports and be done with it already” I hear you say. Well, I prodded some people on IRC and things are in motion as far as I know but this is not the real problem. The problem is that ubuntu-outsiders have to file all sorts of elaborate reports to get some common sense actions to happen in this crazy bureaucracy. If you really must have this system please make sure you have the manpower to check your build queues and the bug-reports and take action yourself. Don’t rely on outsiders to come and tell you that something is wrong.
If this no-bugfix-updates policy is to be continued I think we should stop being dishonest to our users and extend the template bugzilla comments like the “dupe+fixed”:
“[…] You may want to check for a software upgrade.”
and add
“Unless you are running ubuntu. Ubuntu deliberately holds back bugfixes out of fear that the fix may introduce new bugs. If you want to see this bug fixed in ubuntu please go fill out an SRU report at bla bla bla”