We've always been able to decide whether to do an update or not. We're allowed to do it, doesn't mean we have to. I suspect if we'd known about the PipeWire thing, we would have left it out instead of scrambling like we did this time.

We need a better handle on checking dependencies to make these decisions.

Ideally we should stage the rollouts of such major updates and not update the old stable Fedora branch right away at the same time as the stable one. Users that want the latest should be running the latest stable Fedora.

I think it also depends on how soon the old stable will be EOL. For F40, it's a few months away so spending a lot of time on it is not really worth it and doing the QA for F41 & F42 is more interesting. If we have had 6+ months of lifetime still for F40 then it would have made sense to push there.

When we did the planning, that was definitely the case. And we only knew of libdisplay-info as an issue. If we had known about the PipeWire one, we probably wouldn't have bothered.

That's why I'm suggesting that we don't do major version upgrades for the 'older' branches. I did notice that those branches tend to have older versions anyway, so it would fall in line. And changes like the pipewire change in 6.3 was not documented (as far as I know) so they are difficult to catch.

Keep in mind that means we're leaving older Fedora branches completely unmaintained. KDE doesn't offer any maintenance of Plasma after the new version is out. It's not a release train, it's "following HEAD".

We've discussed this and the resolution is that we're going to be "pickier" about this, but ultimately not change our policy.