RHEL and fwupd

[Richard Hughes]

Hi all,

I had a discussion with Red Hat QA yesterday, and we've come up with a
plan that might impact upstream decisions a little. The tl;dr: is
we'll keep 1.7.x fwupd versions in RHEL 8 and put new 1.8.x versions
into only RHEL 9 and Fedora. The reason for this is that some new
plugins have updated deps on libraries like libusb and tools like
meson, and there is almost zero appetite for updating these kinds of
build dependencies in RHEL 8.

If you want your new device supported in RHEL 8, then please submit a
pull request against the 1_7_X branch once the code has been accepted
into the main branch. I'll be a lot more critical in reviewing
backports, and getting a new plugin into the stable tarball release
doesn't necessarily guarantee that the new plugin will make it into
RHEL (of any release) if there are non-zero risks of regressions.
Upstream the policy remains unchanged of course. As always, if you
want to get any particular hardware support in a specific RHEL release
then please let me know in good time -- and of course the prerequisite
is going to be getting the code upstream first, i.e. no shortcuts
allowed.

Comments welcome,

Richard