Joseba Torre wrote:
Hi,
El Martes, 1 de Abril de 2008 a las 04:14, Bill Cole escribió:
That's a question about the competence of the people maintaining that
repository. Presumably these would be the people who blessed a
pre-release version of Dovecot almost 18 months ago, in a period when
such versions were being released every few days *due to bugs*, and
who have not updated their build at any time since. It seems to me
that these are not people who should be tasked or trusted with being
the gatekeepers of software deployment, as that seems to be
demonstrably beyond their competence.
RedHat (and CentOS) has his own policy about releases, and more or less it
is: "no update will break a working instalation". So they try to port any
security patches to their running versions -and this is a lot of work, they
have their own forked version of almost any package!-, but almost never add
any new funcionality. This policy has one great point: it's easy to
understand, and it gives few surprises. And this is great most of the times.
Pre-1.0 Dovecot is the kind of software that doesn't fit well in that policy:
a lot of changes, and no standard stable version. So they chose one
version -1.0rc15 in this case-, because their other option was not including
dovecot. That's exactly why I'm compiling dovecot from source, but I usually
like the default policy.
Aaaaaaaaaagur.
I guess it will drawn groans, but this is largely the reason that I
chose Gentoo for my server distros.
Roughly speaking with most main distros you get a "stuck in stone" set
of packages + bug fixes for those packages each week. This causes few
surprises, but it means that if you need some new feature you are
immediately into compiling from source. Additionally big version
upgrades seem to be approximately once a year and it appears in most
cases this is a take the server down, upgrade it, bring it up and check
the configs kind of process (ie fairly major)
Gentoo goes the other way - everything remains permanently unstable (if
you want to think in those terms). Every time you upgrade you get the
latest and greatest versions... There is a package masking process so
that there isn't "too" much suprise with stuff breaking and local
patches are applied to keep upgrades as simple as possible. This falls
somewhere between a Redhat weekly upgrade kind of stability and a redhat
"operating system version upgrade" experience - ie I wouldn't trust it
to run unattended every sunday without someone watching it, yet on the
other hand I can take a year old server and upgrade all the software on
it to latest stable in an hour without (usually) taking it down.
Pays your money and takes your choice I guess... Suits my needs though
(I often need new features and up to date software)
Ed W
