Fedora Extras is extra

[William M. Quarles]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am So, den 28.11.2004 schrieb William M. Quarles um 23:24:
> 
>>Well, Fedora is hypothetically cutting and bleeding edge, but quite 
>>frankly a lot of the packages that show up in it are out of date.  The 
>>need for these maintainers to supply updated packages just points more 
>>strongly at the fact that Fedora is running behind on some packages, and 
>>updates are necessary for other software to be useful with it.
> 
> Can you be specific and give quite some examples for the "lot of ...
> packages ... out of date"?

Of the top of my head, here is one example.  It looks like someone else 
gave another.  Mozilla on Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux has been 
generally running pretty well behind the official Mozilla releases. 
Which is very odd considering that The Fedora Project has usually been 
right on top of updating the obviously less important Gaim.

I remember on Red Hat Linux 9 I came across an awful bug in Mozilla that 
prevented anything (automatic or manual) from moving more than one 
message at a time when it involved an IMAP server.  It was probably the 
worst functionality (i.e. non-fatal) bug I have ever seen in any 
program, and it was very obvious.  I found that the bug was fixed in an 
offical Mozilla release.  I reported this on Red Hat Bugzilla, and they 
told me that they did not anticipate releasing any future versions of 
Mozilla for Red Hat Linux 9.  They ended up doing it several months 
later anyways, but it wasn't just for my bug.  These two paragraphs seem 
to tell me that there are some Mozilla/Red Hat politics going on of 
which I am not aware.

After Fedora Core 2 came out, I recompiled its Mozilla 1.6 for Fedora 
Core 1 (which even at that time was behind because Mozilla 1.7 was out, 
but as I recall Mozilla 1.7 had some minor issues in it).  It works 
perfectly and can be found on my website at 
<http://physstud.jmu.edu/quarlewm/>.  I modified the spec file so that 
it actually gets i686 optimizations (the original spec file did not have 
one instance of $RPM_OPT_FLAGS in it).  I tried recompiling the Mozilla 
1.7.3 Fedora Core 2 SRPM for Fedora Core 1, but compilation hasn't 
worked yet.

If you want more it will take me some time to put together a list.

----
Peace,
William