On 12/15/2010 06:40 PM, Tian, Kevin wrote:

On the other hand, along with this I realize that there's one area we need further
discuss. How often should we upgrade packages in a given release cycle? MeeGo
only does once. For Yocto we want to keep our recipes in cutting-edge which is
why we schedule two upgrade windows in M2 and M3 this time.

I'd like to question this. Is the goal for Poky/Yocto to track the bleeding-edge releases of software, or is the goal to be a well-tested and stable foundation for embedded software applications?

Upgrading a recipe within a couple of weeks of its release may end up using more of our resources if/when we encounter new bugs that were introduced in the new release. Or worse, if we don't encounter them during distro builds and then our users take our release and discover them for themselves.

I'm not saying we need to be as conservative as long-term-support enterprise Linux distros, but IMHO I think racing to always upgrade our recipes to versions released a handful of weeks ago can be counterproductive in many situations.

A policy I might put forward for consideration is this: recipe upgrades are done once per release cycle, and upstream versions that have come out within the last 30 days should not be upgraded unless we have a really good reason for doing so.

Scott

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Scott Garman
Embedded Linux Distro Engineer - Yocto Project