On Feb 24, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Johnny Hughes johnny@centos.org wrote:
I am not saying this to be a smart a$$ or be negative ... just saying that other enterprise distributions exist that provide long term stability without backports ... Unbuntu LTS is a free example. They also provide integration of all their system libraries and audit their software for security compliance.
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.
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.
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.
-Ross