[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Arnout Vandecappelle,

On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 23:55:17 +0200, Arnout Vandecappelle wrote:

> > What I wanted to add in this discussion is this: if there are people
> > out there that have time for some buildroot development but they have
> > no clear goal of their own, they can among others choose between
> > package bumps and fixing autobuild failures.
> > While there certainly is value in package bumping, I hope that not all
> > of these people jump onto the bump-train and instead help with the
> > autobuild failures. We still hope to get to 0 failures at some point,
> > and bumping packages all the time will most of the time only add new
> > problems.
> 
>   I'm also not too hot on version bumping just for the sake of bumping. 
> Version bumps should be done when they're useful for someone, e.g. 
> because a feature or bugfix is added. If it's useful to you, then you'll 
> obviously test if it still works correctly.

I understand this point of view, but on the other hand, it's not really
nice to have packages that have very old versions. For "core" stuff
that isn't necessarily very easy to bump (think Qt, Gtk, X.org and
things like that), it's quite important that the core Buildroot
community keeps that up to date, because this is difficult to do for
newcomers, and this is what people will look at to see if Buildroot is
well-maintained and active.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com