Re: Replacing Vendor rpms.

[Michael Jennings <mej kainx org>]

On Thursday, 14 September 2006, at 18:26:21 (-0700),
Frank Cusack wrote:

> 1) they pull patches from CVS (gotta be on the bleeding edge all the
> time, you know, nothing else will do) before packages actually get a
> version bump, and/or 2) they generate fixes themselves which later
> make it upstream.  In both cases they then fail to keep pace when
> the upstream version is bumped, probably to "save" maintenance
> effort.

They backport fixes or do them themselves, either way.  Why?  The very
SONAME and shared library issues being discussed in this thread.
That, and because upstream changes can sometimes be too drastic or can
break binary compatibility.

It's a matter of giving ISV's and servers a consistent long-term ABI
to rely on.  Nothing more, nothing less.

And in the case of RH, for the most part, they do a damn good job
keeping things consistent.  Not always, but mostly.

Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <mej kainx org>
n + 1, Inc., http://www.nplus1.net/       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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