On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:03:48PM +1000, Noel Butler wrote:
The problem however is many people very dangerously and wrongly consider that their beloved favourite distro package, is in fact the current stable and the only one that exists. I'm horrified by the number of people responsible for servers that wont use anything but an rpm or a deb, they simply refuse to use the source, even though its current and stable, far more so than that rpm/deb file at like 3 years out of date, and they have the nerve to get narky at you for not helping them *sigh*
Well I can agree otherwise, but I can understand them too: they use (or even bought with support) a distribution to have a solution, otherwise they would be able to use own distro, compiling everything from source (hmm, gentoo?). The problem, that if they use many softwares and all of their makers say "use a newer one" soon they would find themselves with compiling _everything_ (the kernel itself too, soon, if it's based on an OS with open source kernel at least) from source, and maybe they don't want this, especially not with dozens of servers with their own managing tools, and so on. But otherwise fully agreed, I'm using most server softwares compiled from sources :) Just I tried to understand the other opinion too. Hopefully it was not highly off-topic here to tell this. [but it's also true that if they want the distributor's packages, they should ask for help from them maybe, because developers are focusing on the up-to-date versions and also next development ones, but not very old ones even patched by distributors with custom and/or backported patches ...]