Good bye

[Les Mikesell]

Michael A. Peters wrote:

>> level.  RHEL5 is still shipping Firefox 1.1.5 AFAIK, and equally ancient
>> versions of other applications.  That may be fine for enterprise
>> managers, but many single users and developers would like to be able to
>> keep up with application and toolchain advances.  
> 
> RHEL5 has the latest 1.5 firefox - but you can easily install 2.0 if you 
> want to. In fact, RHEL has even created a directory called /usr/local 
> just to make it easier for you.

How do you install a copy that will update itself automatically when 
security updates are issued?

> RHEL 5 software is not "ancient" versions. It is stable versions.

That should be the upstream author's designation, shouldn't it?  Does 
the mozilla group still even admit that firefox 1.5 exists?  What about 
the beta dovecot that was shipped in RHEL4 and never updated to the 
release version?  Complaints about the old bugs kept showing up in the 
upstream mailing list years after the stable release, confusing everyone.

> I ran Fedora 8 on two different computers and experienced much 
> instability.

Which means that's probably not the best way to get current versions of 
firefox, thunderbird, and OpenOffice.

>> People talk about TCO and point out that there's lots more application
>> software bundled with with a typical Linux distro than with Windows.
>> That's all very good, but unbundled applications have the advantage that
>> the user isn't tied to the bundled release of the application if they
>> want to stay with a particular version of the system.
> 
> You can update software if you want.

You can compile your own kernel and assemble your own distribution from 
scratch too.  Then you have to maintain them, which most people can't 
afford to do.  Wouldn't it make more sense to have mostly compatible 
repositories for unstable/testing/stable versions of programs so you 
could update specific programs where you need new features without 
having to deal with instability in all the others?


>> But there seems to be an attitude on the part of some people in the
>> community that the best way to pressure vendors of proprietary software
>> to open their code is to force users who need that software to suffer
>> without it.  I think that alienates users and is counterproductive.
> 
> No - no one wants to force users to suffer.

You aren't from around here, are you?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com