Quoting Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com>:
On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 09:56, Eric Rostetter wrote:
Unless I'm missing something, RHEL will have the same problem when they do the next full release that contains version-level updates to applications.
RHEL 3.x no. RHEL 4.x maybe. RHEL 5.x who knows.
Full version upgrades aren't supported, so I'd expect 5.x to contain a fairly current dovecot and you'll be on your own to convert anything running on your 4.x machine. I'd be very surprised if your 'maybe' for 4.x includes a behavior changing update though - the point of these long-lived distros is that they don't have that kind of change and the side effect is that you don't get new features.
I would also be surprised, but I can't rule it out since I can't (yet) read the future, so I decided to say 'maybe' instead. For the same reason (I can't read the future) I can't say anything useful about RHEL 5.x.
They can either change the code to be backwards compatible, or provide an automatic conversion, or (worst case) just try to document the process well and alert everyone to the issues.
In any case, it isn't as blind as someone doing the upgrade now on their own.
In many cases it's worse.
I guess you can read that either way. If they backport it, it is indeed even more "blind" to the end user. If they don't try to smooth over it, then they will no doubt write the changes up well and it will be much less blind. So it depends on how they do it.
In either case, I think it is "less blind" than someone trying to manage the software on their own without doing due dilligence.
-- Eric Rostetter The Department of Physics The University of Texas at Austin
Go Longhorns!