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by tspiteri
2116 days ago
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Maybe web browsers are an extreme case, but I think your model would only work for long term releases. It is not reasonable to expect browser vendors to backport all security fixes to all releases so that users on old releases get essential security fixes. So while I do agree that your model should be the default, I see nothing wrong in allowing people who want to live on the edge to have a release with updates that do affect the interface (I use Fedora not CentOS, and I want the updates). |
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Why? We built software and supported old releases for decades just fine until the current toxic culture of pushing out frequent, often poorly-tested changes over the Internet came along.
Jacques has this one right. There are different reasons for updates, and conflating them is a problem.
It would be in everyone's best interests if we rapidly patched security vulnerabilities. It might be in a user's best interests to receive a fix for a bug that was preventing the software from functioning properly, if the user wants that functionality. It might be in a user's best interests to receive an update that adds support for some new hardware or online service or data format, if the user is interested in compatibility with those things.
None of the cases above implies any loss of existing functionality or change in existing UI, though. Updates can do those things as well, but we should clearly distinguish those from updates for reasons like security, robustness or compatibility, and it is not obvious that the same update procedures will be appropriate for all of these cases.