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.