--On Wednesday, August 20, 2008 11:23 AM -0400 Charles Marcus CMarcus@Media-Brokers.com wrote:
Why anyone would knowingly run ancient versions of critical apps is beyond me.
Stability. It's not uncommon for apps to be interdependent. Upgrading one can have unexpected consequences in another app.
For this reason, RHEL back-ports fixes for critical apps rather that automatically upgrading to the latest version. For it to do so, it needs to have patches for specific issues registered in Bugzilla.
For those of us willing to take the risk of wholesale upgrade to the bleeding edge, we can grab an RPM from Red Hat's Rawhide distro. My practice is usually to grab the source RPM and rebuild it to match the libraries I have on my distro (CentOS 5).
In some cases, 3rd party distros like atrpms.net and RPMForge carry the latest version pre-built for many distros. If I need a package that RPMForge supports, I'll grab the binary from there.