[gdal-dev] About bug fix / patch release policy for older GDAL versions (setuptools >= 58.0 and GDAL <3.3 compatibility issues)

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 3/25/22 12:07, Even Rouault wrote:
> what you discuss here is all about the patch & backport policy of the 
> Debian GDAL package. You can try to file a bug to Debian and point to 
> the patch you'd want to see backported, but I can't promise if there 
> would be interest in their maintenance team to create an updated package 
> with it (my understanding is that even if we'd release a new 3.2.x patch 
> release, it wouldn't be packaged in LTS distributions. I'm not sure how 
> much of that is linked to Debian policy or availability of people that 
> do the work)

Packages in Debian stable releases only get updates to fix bugs of 
severity important or higher [0]. GDAL patch releases also contain 
changes for lower severity issues, it's not worth the effort to vet all 
those changes. Any changes to packages in stable also risk introducing 
regressions which are highly undesirable in LTS releases known for their 
stability.

People should be maintaining their own packaging repositories where they 
host packages with changes for their needs that cannot be easily 
upstreamed to the package in the distribution itself. Scratching your 
own itch was a corner stone of Open Source that people are seemingly 
forgetting or never having known about in the first place.

[0] 
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#special-case-uploads-to-the-stable-and-oldstable-distributions

Kind Regards,

Bas

-- 
  GPG Key ID: 4096R/6750F10AE88D4AF1
Fingerprint: 8182 DE41 7056 408D 6146  50D1 6750 F10A E88D 4AF1