[CentOS] Centosplus & CentOS Extras, Enlarge your tent , Cuckoo repos

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Mon Mar 13 21:26:07 UTC 2006


On Monday 13 March 2006 13:59, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Maybe someday a distribution will figure out that users really
> want a stable OS along with current apps instead of bundling
> new device drivers along with version-level desktop app
> updates.  Until then, or at least until packaging lets you
> install new/expermental versions alongside your well-tested
> working application, people will continue to do strange and
> desperate things...

Let me make a minor edit to this well-thought-out paragraph, Les.  The change 
is from 'distribution' to 'upstream open-source developers who have a NIH 
attitude and who insist on their required version of any given library as 
being The Only Acceptable Version'.  Typically the distribution has very 
little control on what the upstream requires (this isn't strictly true for 
Red Hat or Novell, since they employee a good sized percentage of upstream 
developers.  

Thus the need to keep so many versions of, say, GTK or OpenSSL in the 
distribution.  It goes back to the upstream's willingness to work with older 
versions of libraries.  And, in this case, I'm not referring to Red Hat as 
the upstream; I referring to MySQL AB, the PostgreSQL Global Development 
Group, the KDE project, the GCC and GLIBC developers, the Linux developers, 
etc.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu



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