From: Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com

If you believe that, you have to believe that Red Hat's programmers are always better than the original upstream program author.

How do you assert that? It has _nothing_ to do with my statement.

You keep thinking there is this absolute "black/white" on why developers, vendors, etc... do this or that. There are reasons to upgrade to a newer version, and there are other reasons to backport. One is _not_ better than the other, or developers are not any more or less "smart" if they do.

What I said was it is _harder_ for a distro to take the take to backport fixes and minimize impact to existing compatibility than to merely just rely and ship the latest version from a developer. There are reasons to upgrade (features, project support, etc...) and there are reason to backport (minimal impact, regression tested inter-package compatibility, etc...).

There is no "black/white" on which one is "better." I just merely stated _why_ SLA guaranteed distros do the "backport," which is more difficult to accommodate because the project developers/support typically are just focused on the next version, and you have to replicate much of their knowledge/expertise internally (instead of just taking their next version with the patches/fixes).

I'll agree that they are good and on the average do a good job, but that stops far short of saying that they know better than the perl (etc.) teams what version you should be running.

And _where_ did I say that?

All I said was that _backporting_ is done to _minimize_ impact to the _entire_ set of _all_ packages that have been "regression tested" into a released, SLA guaranteed distro. That's what RHEL/SLES are about.

At what point are you going to stop seeing what I saw as a black/white thing and realize that RHEL/SLES have _different_ foci than what you may want, and _that's_ why you're not getting what you want in stock CentOS? Is it really that hard to understand?

When you understand that there is a pro/con to "staying current" v. "backports," and why distros like RHEL/SLES are typically "anal" to the "backport" side -- which seemingly conflicts with what you want, then we can talk.

Until then, you seem to want to assert that what I'm saying is something about "better" when that is _not_ what I'm saying. I'm trying to explain "why" -- _not_ "better."

End of thread.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org