On 23/03/2022 12:51, Stella Ashburne wrote:
Hi Samuli
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2022 at 6:04 PM
From: "Samuli Seppänen" <sam...@openvpn.net>
To: "Stella Ashburne" <rewe...@gmx.com>, openvpn-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Openvpn-users] Request .deb package of OpenVPN 2.5.6
There are esoteric technical reasons for that.
Would you like to elaborate what those "esoteric technical reasons"
are with regards to building the .deb package? Are the "esoteric
technical reasons" confined to Debian only? I ask because David
Sommerseth produced the openvpn package, version 2.5.5 and now 2.5.6,
for Fedora 35, such as openvpn-2.5.6-1.fc35 (URL:
https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/openvpn/openvpn/fedora-35-updates.html)
So you got my attention ;-) Both as an OpenVPN Inc employee, working on
the open source projects, and as the official Fedora openvpn package
maintainer.
The Fedora build you point at uses the standard upstream distro
repository build system. And a similar infrastructure is also used for
the Fedora Copr builds. Btw. openvpn-2.5.6 builds are already in all
the Fedora pipes.
The .deb package repositories hosted on
<http://build.openvpn.net/debian/openvpn/> is a different story, as
that's based on infrastructure managed by the OpenVPN project. This
infrastructure has been through some massive overhaul, and it seems
Samuli hit some dark corners there causing issues with the builds for
this repository.
That said, comparing upstream Fedora 3x repos with the OpenVPN project
provided repos is not really a fair reference point. The Fedora
repositories are similar to the upstream Debian repositories - but
version wise, they are probably much closer to Fedora EPEL repositories.
And in regards to upstream distribution repositories, the package
maintainers there ensure that the OpenVPN versions distributed from
there are up-to-date in regards to important bug and security fixes.
They are typically back-ported from newer versions. The version number
in these repositories may not be completely accurate. But very seldom
are features back-ported. This is due to repository polices, where
major version updates are not allowed and minor updates are attempted
kept at a minimum for the distribution - to ensure the package stays
stable and have a predictable behavior.
The Fedora Copr repos is somewhat similar to Ubuntu PPA. These
repositories does not have the same strict version upgrade policy, but
also does not carry the same types of stability guarantees.
The project provided apt repository is also a best-effort repository.
There are no guarantees it won't break, but we try to fix things as soon
as possible. On the other hand, the official OpenVPN 2.x releases from
the project are generally very stable. But it does not go through the
same set of testing which many distributions does before shipping it.
I hope this could clarify a bit of the differences and align some of the
expectations better.
--
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
OpenVPN Inc
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