[CentOS] Re: Site about qmail (with CentOS as SO)

Wed Oct 24 20:26:13 UTC 2007
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com