on 10/24/2007 1:26 PM Les Mikesell spake the following:
Johnny Hughes wrote:
No. But we had that stuff rather regularly with samba - their first line of support seems to be : "Upgrade your version to the most current one, then ask again."
That's what I meant.
That is very common with applications. They don't back patch old versions, and the problem you ask about might be already fixed. Just look at the dovecot list. People still pop in and ask why 0.99 has this problem, because that is what their distro came with, but they are currently at 1.0.5, and have 1.1 in beta. Who has the time to backport fixes to old versions if you don't get paid for it?
And what's the point even if you do get paid? The problem is really in distributions that by policy won't do a version level app upgrade even in instances where it would clearly be better than patching the beta version they chose to include.
Well ... Even IF the dovecot people backported patches to 0.99 ... RHEL would probably not bring those patches in anyway, unless it fixed a problem that they have in the RH bugzilla. That is the whole purpose of freezing on the enterprise distribution.
Why should dovecot people have anything more to do with a beta version that they no longer support? It wasn't their choice for that version to live on (nearly) forever.
They fix security updates and bugs and you run it like it was released ... IT IS THE WHOLE FREAKING POINT.
IF that isn't the distribution type you want ... CentOS is not the distribution for you :D
So which distribution makes intelligent decisions about how to best maintain each application package instead of applying a blanket policy that obviously doesn't fit everything? I do, of course, want stability in most of the packages - just not where a barely functional beta was shipped in the first place.
Sometimes you just have to take care of one or two needed apps yourself if you want the extra features. Enterprise class distros are the turtle running against the hare. Slow and steady, and don't break anything else, or break apps themselves because of major config changes.