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.
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. Unless you wade your way through the patches included in the src rpm files you have no idea what code is really in any particular application version. They are still backporting stuff into 3.x apps without bumping app version numbers. However, since the mods don't normally change behavior (or at least intended behavior...) it usually doesn't matter.
The difference is just that fedora doesn't backport bugfixes into the old versions for so long.
There are a lot more differences than that!
Yes, but that's the one that keeps you from sticking to an older FCx version when you don't want surprises from the full-version upgrade. Otherwise there's not much differnce between an end-of-life FC1 and RHEL3 and FC3/RHELEL4.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com