On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Scott Silva wrote:
on 10-29-2008 11:54 AM Spike Turner spake the following:
Dag Wieers wrote:
So if we can improve the testing during the RHEL Beta program, everyone in the CentOS community directly benefits from that as well. Therefor it makes a lot of sense to encourage the large CentOS community to take part in the RHEL Beta program and help with improving the next CentOS releases. (You don't need my back patting, start already !)
These are the release notes http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.3/html/Release_N...
One commentary on RHEL 5.3 beta states "Support for Windows Vista and 2008 is provided by Red Hat's rebased Samba 3.0.32." I would have like to have seen Red Hat release a rebased Samba 3.0.32 through fastrack for 4.7 and 5.2
RedHat has not been in the habit, until recently, of releasing newer versions of anything. They usually just backported what they needed or wanted to their base. I think the new Firefox was a giant leap forward for them, as I thought they were going to try and keep 1.5 patched for the next 5 years or so.
I suppose that either they are trying to economize on some of that labor, or they are trying to respond to the users requests. Either way, you have to take the updates as they see fit to release them, or try for the source rpm and compile and test it on your own.
Whatever the reason, I guess we are benefiting from it.
They do it very much on a case by case basis where it makes the most sense. Both on resources, functionality and business needs.
Wrt. samba, the Samba project does a very good job in regression testing and based on functionality they have to keep close to developments in the Windows world as well.
Wrt. firefox, it is typically not used on servers so backward compatibility is not that important. It was a beast to maintain (wrt. security) and it was the source of too many RHSA. Their RHEL Security reports even go so far to make a distinction between the security of the core OS and the typical desktop applications because of this. It was probably also the reason why they tried to remove desktop applications from their server product.
It is interesting to see how they defined their products and in time find better ways and redefine what they want to deliver. But it is hard to have simple rules for something that is big and important.