nvidia

[Les Mikesell]

Anders Karlsson wrote:
> Thus, Les Mikesell at Mon Oct 29 23:45:49 2007 inscribed:
>> Craig White wrote:
>>
>>>> I want something tested but not ancient.  Neither disto provides that 
>>>> except for the first few months after an RHEL cut.  But I'm usually happy 
>>>> with old kernel and server apps (except subversion and dovecot...). It's  
>>>> generally just the desktop stuff that changes fast enough to care about.
>>> ----
>>> the problem is and will always be the interdependence among the various
>>> packages. While it may be convenient to look at things in a vacuum, they
>>> simply don't work that way - one package update requires updates on
>>> requisite packages which impacts something else down the line. The very
>>> thing that makes you rich, makes you poor.
>> That's a possibility, but rarely the case except perhaps for the Gnome/KDE 
>> environments themselves.  Usually it is possible to build current packages 
>> on older RHEL versions, but then you have to maintain them yourself.
> 
> Let me see if I have understood this right. You look at subversion or
> dovecot in RHEL5, and you can determine by just looking at the version
> number that they are insufficient for your needs, even if they were
> suitable five months earlier, when RHEL5 was just released?

Not RHEL5, RHEL4 which is just barely middle-aged.

> That, to me at least, would indicate that you have totally failed to
> understand the purpose of RHEL and the value that it provides to
> Enterprise customers.

There is much value in not having to update an OS and all the system 
libraries for several years and if the machine runs fine there should be 
no need to replace device drivers just to get a non-beta dovecot.

> It also would indicate that you do not
> understand how Red Hat maintain each release of RHEL (although you are
> in good company there, as some customers don't understand that either
> to start with). 

I do understand it - and I even like it for most server software because 
that has been feature-complete for years now.  I was pointing out 
dovecot and subversion as rare exceptions on the server side just 
because of the progress they have made since the RHEL4 cut.  On the 
desktop, though, everything is improving rapidly - but that still 
doesn't mean I want to have to replace working device drivers to get a 
new firefox.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com