On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Always Learning <centos at u61.u22.net> wrote: > > On Wed, 2011-09-07 at 09:51 -0400, Digimer wrote: > >> Red Hat is a business, and made a simple business decision. Maintaining >> Xen support would have meant maintaining a very large set of patches. >> They made the decision that the effort (and money) needed to maintain >> Xen outside of the mainline kernel was not worth it. > > Perhaps a silly question, but why maintain patches ? Why not compile a > new version and discard all the patches ? Patches are a messy manner to > maintain programmes. For the same reason that Red Hat uses patches to back port security updates and functionality into the kernel, httpd, and most of the other packages in RHEL. Introducing a version change may add/remove functionality, may alter configuration options, may be lest tested, etc. The point of using an "enterprise" distro is that change is kept to a minimum. -- William Hooper