<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>On Feb 24, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Johnny Hughes <<a href="mailto:johnny@centos.org">johnny@centos.org</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><span>I am not saying this to be a smart a$$ or be negative ... just saying</span><br><span>that other enterprise distributions exist that provide long term</span><br><span>stability without backports ... Unbuntu LTS is a free example. They</span><br><span>also provide integration of all their system libraries and audit their</span><br><span>software for security compliance.</span><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#005001"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#0023A3"><br></font></font></blockquote><br><div></div><div>I think the primary driving factor for Redhat to employ the backport method is to maintain a stable ABI across a release, and the primary reason for that is for third party application support.</div><div><br></div><div>Redhat wants to provide a platform for which commercial vendors can develop their wares such that they can say it supports RHEL 5 or 6 and it will actually run on said platform without loss of functionality or stability.</div><div><br></div><div>I doubt the same can be said about Ubuntu LTS or even SLES where a change in a library can result in either the third party application not working or working with limited functionality.</div><div><br></div><div>-Ross</div><div><br></div></body></html>