Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>> 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).
Unfortunately, upstream developers don't always release bugfix-only
releases. Many times they introduce new features or change the
behavior of old features.
Agreed - sometimes they do things as bizarre as dropping a feature, then
putting it back with a different name, like "yum --download-only" vs.
much later an optional module invoked as "yum --downloadonly".
Introducing new features means that there
are probably new bugs which is bad for distributions like RHEL/CentOS.
But again, that's a package by package issue as to whether upstream is
improved or not. And mostly RHEL/Centos treats the whole distro the same.
Changing the behavior of old features is just as bad for
RHEL/CentOS
because people are building systems that expect the old behavior.
Yes, ideally there would be an optional, alternate repo for
behavior-changing updates.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com