[mythtv-users] FAO Myth distro package maintainers.

[David]

I've been thinking about Myth's stability.

Generally the releases are pretty good (!) :)

However, occasionally things happen (0.15.1, the nfs file close problem 
in 0.16, the ww.weather.com issue)
ie right now I'd like to see 0.17.1 include a fix for the weather 
problem rather than wait until 0.18 (or hacking hosts/xml)
(Well, truth be told, I'm still on 0.16 so I'd have have liked an 
nfs-close patch release...)

The problem with this is that the fix for weather is mixed in with a 
load of other CVS changes so it's hard to create a 0.17.1

I was wondering whether a leaf could be taken out of the linux kernel's 
recent 'stable' approach?
Essentially gather a set of patches together that all the maintainers 
can use to release 'stable' upgrades?
All distro packagers could submit/veto patches... that kind of thing.

These patches would offer no new features but would fix simple bugs. In 
general they'd have been applied to CVS.
Maybe not all bugs - some would be too intrusive, the fix may be CVS 
only etc etc.

The objective being that an 'upgrade' to one of these point/patch 
releases would be a very safe, 5 minute job with (almost!) zero risk of 
screwing up. Any patch that doesn't meet these criteria could be vetoed.
Users could then safely be told to upgrade to a point/patch release 
whenever a new one was released (hey, by version 0.20, maybe that could 
be (semi-)automatic a la "MS automatic updates")

I was also wondering whether this should be agreed amongst the distro 
maintainers (it'd be nice if all of them using the same subversion were 
based on at least the same source code)

Also, I'd stress that (unless they want it to be) this would not be an 
official developer supported thing - more a package maintainer applying 
a bug for his customers - essentially the same as Debian does in 
applying patches to the package and then forwarding them upstream.

Maybe it would be worth considering a myth-packagers mail list to 
promote some consistency amongst the packages?

David
PS Although I used 0.17.1 as an example, I think that Isaac 'owns' that 
numbering format - I'd suggest a suffix -p1, -p2 etc
But I'd like all the distros to mean the same thing.