Alfred von Campe wrote:
On Jan 16, 2009, at 15:49, Ned Slider wrote:
I've rebuilt most of the upstream fastrack packages for CentOS-5.2 here:
http://centos.toracat.org/ned/CentOS-5/testing/
Usual disclaimers apply - provided "as is", and use at your own risk.
Great, I grabbed a copy but will probably not install/test it until next week.
My (limited) understanding of upstream's Fastrack channel is that these bug fixes will be released into the next point update release (e.g, RHEL-5.3).
Yeah, that was my impression as well. I wonder how Red Hat decides what goes into updates and what goes into FasTrack.
In any event, thanks for making this available, Ned.
You're welcome. I also understand that Scientific Linux also builds the fastrack packages so that's another potential source for these updates.
My understanding is that these are mostly trivial bug fix updates from reading the errata (some such as for the ORBit2 package are almost comical if you examine the included patch). My guess is that upstream would not wish to increase the burden on sysadmins with trivial updates when in many production environments all updates must be vetted before they can be deployed. Upstream has a habit of holding back less critical updates until a point they can be conveniently integrated into a single release. However, that doesn't always happen with Fastrack fixes. The recent xterm security update is a case in point - xterm packages exists in Fastrack containing a bug fix update and when a recent security issue was fixed, upstream chose not to take the opportunity to also include the fastrack fix but rather released separate security fixes to both updates and fastrack channels.