New Releases

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 13:08:15 -0400, you wrote:

>Bear with this newbie a moment... If I read you correctly, the open
>source projects you speak of are additional software and users want the
>newest software on the older operating systems.  

They are projects like Python, whose community got very upset when Red
Hat stuck with Python 1.5 for the entire Red Hat 7.* series (.0 -> .3,
a 2 year period) for binary compatibility but caused many problems for
the Python community who had moved on to Python 2.0 (and maybe even
2.2) by the time Red Hat 8 came out.

>I still see that being more of a problem with faster os updates.  Slow
>down the os updates and the other projects will be compatible longer.

This would be useful if all the projects released new versions at the
same time.  But they don't, which means somebody will always be out of
sync with a long distribution release cycle.  A shorter cycle
minimizes this as it means you are typically at worst 6 months away
from being included in the next release.