On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Joerg Schilling Joerg.Schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
Would you like to run a Linux kernel from 2004 today?
Has the CD format changed since 2004?
This is why you are happy with buggy software from 2004 shipped by redhat when there is software with no known bugs?
This isn't aimed at you personally, but the reason people like RHEL/CentOS is that the 'no known bugs' status of a developer's software release often turns pretty quickly into 'bugs with no known fix' when they hit a wider distribution. And developers like to change things in ways that break existing interfaces in what they think are improvements.
Redhat had more than 100 bugs filed against the "cdrtools" version they ship. All these bugs could be avoided by upgrading to a recent original version. Redhat closed these unfixed bugs instead of doing it's homework that would result in updated versions.
So it seems that redhat doesn't care about bug reports.
You are in a better position to judge that than me, but the whole point of RHEL is to never break exiting, previously working interfaces (and thus their user's programs...) within the life cycle of the distro. So if they would lose backwards compatibility anywhere by updating - and perhaps even if it isn't clear that they wouldn't, they they are correctly following the policy that the people on this list typically want. Othewise we'd be off reinstalling todays new and buggy version of some other disto instead of reading email while our servers keep working. But, maybe it's not so great for desktop type activity that wasn't feature-complete in 2004. And if you are talking about bug reports that were made long enough before the 6.0 release to have gotten the update in, then I'd say you are right regardless of compatibility.