On 2/24/11 7:37 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote: > On 02/24/2011 05:43 PM, Ross Walker wrote: >> On Feb 24, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Johnny Hughes<johnny at centos.org >> <mailto:johnny at 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. > > That is absolutely true and I agree with you 100% ... I like the > constant ABI across the release and the backport model, otherwise I > would be building "something else". Can someone remind me why VMware server 2.x broke with a RHEL/CentOS 5.x glibc update? I switched back to 1.x which I like better anyway, but if the reason for putting up with oldness is to keep that from happening, it didn't work. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com