Benjamin Franz wrote:
It has stunned me for years that RH has never 're-spun' RHEL3 to upgrade actively broken versions of software like Perl 5.8.0 to a more 'bug-fixed' version.
If they did, they would have to guarantee that there are no behavior changes that will cause surprises. The whole point of RHEL3 is that such things don't happen. Instead they backport the bugfixes that they consider important, so their perl 5.8.0 probably isn't quite as broken as you think.
You get an incremental distro upgrade rather than a 'rip my system out by its roots' upgrade most of the time.
But it doesn't work very well because everything is intertwined. If you update perl you have to update httpd to build the new mod_perl. And so on.
You don't generally need spinoffs from fedora because you can install whatever you want from the extras and 3rd party repositories.
I don't buy that. *Every* major distro, including Ubuntu, has 'extra' and 3rd party repository equivalents: It isn't about *need*.
It is, but only the single-CD install versions need the specialized builds. For the others you just install what you want - or all of it.
So go to a 'waterfall' distro model. As new things come out, *put them out*. The current model is the 'one big update' model. Hundreds or thousands of changes made at once.
You can do that now by using one of the third party repos that stocks newer builds. You'll break things randomly when things have conflicting library needs - and the same would happen to a distro attempting that.
If you have a hundred uber-developers doing nothing but the wicked cool leading edge work and that is your entire distro eco-system, your distro is dead for all practical purposes.
The real developers are the ones working on the upstream applications shared by all distributions. I doubt if you'll find any of them that are interested in backporting their current work into old fedora versions for people too lazy to install something recent. That's grunge work that gets done for enterprise versions because people get paid to do it and not really part of a community process.