On 08/10/2021 16:17, Stella Ashburne wrote:
Hi Mathias
Sent: Friday, October 08, 2021 at 3:00 PM
From: "Mathias Jeschke" <openvpn-us...@0xaffe.de>
To: openvpn-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Openvpn-users] Unable to locate the .deb package of OpenVPN 2.5.4
for Debian 11/Bullseye
What is wrong with the Debian package from the official repo?
https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/openvpn
Do you really need 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.1?
Your questions are really pertinent.
For as long as I can remember, the person who built and released the community
versions of OpenVPN also released them for Debian. That person preceded our
friend, Samuli. I just went with whatever was offered by that person and then
Samuli.
You asked me: "Do you really need 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.1?" I myself am unable
to answer it.
It's good to understand how distribution packages are maintained. I'm a
Fedora/RHEL/CentOS user/contributor myself, so there might be some
details not matching completely with Debian/Ubuntu. But it should be
somewhat similar.
- Major updates of a package (for OpenVPN, that means 2.4->2.5,
2.5->2.6, etc), these happens in the major distribution releases (like
Debian 10 to Debian 11)
- Minor updates of a package (for OpenVPN: 2.5.1->2.5.2->2.5.3, etc) can
be handled in two ways.
a) Update to the upstream minor release; which is what I do for
Fedora/Fedora EPEL/Fedora Copr repositories. This updates the
package version number in the package.
b) Backport important fixes from newer releases to the current one in
the distribution. This keeps the upstream version but updates the
"build" number. This is very common for Debian/Ubuntu, as well as
for enterprise distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise
Linux and CentOS.
Both these approaches gives you a reliable and up-to-date version.
Method b) often results in smaller changes being applied, so the
stability can often be more predictable - but it depends on how good
the package maintainer is. The OpenVPN package maintainer for Debian
packages (which ends up in Ubuntu too) are well maintained.
Using the OpenVPN community provided packages is commonly more useful
when the distro provided version is based on an older OpenVPN major
release. If there are no new features you require in the community
provided repository, using the standard distro repository might be more
than good enough.
On the other hand, it might take a bit longer for a distribution
repository to get an updated package compared to using the community
provided packages.
That's the quicker introduction to this topic.
--
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
OpenVPN Inc
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