Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Tue Nov 27 00:21:58 UTC 2007


On Monday 26 November 2007, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> I'm still left wondering what your actual complaint is.   It's clearly
> not what the other poster has suggested you meant... you clearly dont
> care about wmware or other binary modules..or if you do you have no
> idea what the fundamental issues associated with such things are as it
> relates to kernel development.  In any event, you are being extremely
> unclear as to why the fedora kernels are a problem for you
> specifically.

I've followed Les's argument for a long time; he (and others) want kernel 
stability but not userland stability.  There are instances where I want that 
too, for specialized drivers (in my case data acquisition card drivers).  The 
Fedora kernel (and the upstream kernel) regularly changes at the module ABI 
level (or even the source interface level, with wholesale header file changes 
that even break source-code-provided modules).  This is highly inconvenient 
at best, insidious at worst.

The CentOS and RHEL kernel, OTOH, has security patches backported but the ABI 
is fairly constant throughout the usable life.

> If you can live with yesterday's kernel you can certainly live with
> yesterday's applications.

Why?  If this were true, kde-redhat's RHEL repo wouldn't need to exist.  
KDE-Redhat for RHEL exists, therefore this isn't true.
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu




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