Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 8:38 AM, Ralf Corsepius rc040203@freenet.de wrote:
True, at the time RHEL5 was new, it had been more or less a rebuilt FC5/6 and switching between them had not been a major problem.
Nowadays, it isn't anymore and even will be less when FC10 comes out.
I.e. to today's FC7 or FC8 users, RHEL5 or CentOS5 are not viable alternatives. They are kind of a flashback to yesterday's state-of-art.
Well, DUH!
Long term stability is achieved by *NOT ADDING NEW FEATURES*. *ADDING NEW FEATURES INTRODUCES NEW BUGS*
But that's generally an upstream issue. The bugs get fixed upstream but in general the new releases aren't included in RHEL/Centos updates even after the updated program becomes less buggy that the shipped version. (Firefox and OO being recent, rare exceptions).
*YOU CAN'T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO*
And sometimes you don't get either. Like a beta Dovecot shipped in RHEL 4 and not replaced by the stable upstream when the release version was available.
Sorry for shouting, but all of these people demanding a "Fedora LTS" don't seem to get this fundamental point.
Your point applies only on a package-by-package basis, but RHEL applies it across the board (with the above-mentioned rare exceptions).
I mean really, if RHEL5 switched from KDE3.5 to KDE4.0 I'd be screaming bloody murder.
Nobody ever claimed KDE 4.0 was stable, did they?
Or even from BIND 9.3 to BIND 9.5. Or whatever.
Not sure about that, but if upstream says it is better, it probably is.