philosophical question

[Dave Ihnat]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 07:26:33AM -0500, Tom Westheimer wrote:
> My philosophical  question is how does one tackle getting everyting up 
> to date when installing new modules??   So I guess I am looking for some 
> general guidelines that should be used. 

This is the main impetus for commercial Linux distributions.  In theory,
THEY take responsibility for keeping up-to-date, and their automated
update mechanisms--up2date, in the case of Redhat--allow you to (in
theory) transparently maintain currency .

But there are gotchas.  The biggest is that they won't continue to update
a distribution indefinitely; you're RH 7.0, so you're off the screen
as far as Redhat's concerned.  There's an entire world of argument
here--it can be argued that there should be a contiguous continuum of
incrementally updatable packages, so end-users aren't orphaned.  While
this is possible, there are factors that argue against it.  First, there
are sometimes changes to the kernel and major support components (such
as the 'C' library) that are so sweeping that maintaining compatibility
is exceedingly difficult and fragile.  Secondly, it's economics--the
vendor can make more money by requiring you to buy a new distribution,
and can save money by not having to support the tweaking and testing to
assure seamless incremental updates to old versions, or maintaining a
complex web of dependencies for open-ended update version streams.

SO, as long as a distribution is maintained by the vendor, you may not
get the bleeding-edge latest'n'greatest versions of packages from them,
but you WILL be able to automatically update to relatively current
versions that the vendor will (is supposed to, anyway) assure meet
interdependency requirements.

But what about when you've fallen off the edge?  There are two choices.
First, upgrade to the currently supported distribution before Redhat, or
whomever your vendor may be, decides your distro is obsolete.

Secondly, do what all of us old Unix hackers have always had to do--find
the packages and build 'em yourself.  And yes, this immediately breaks
the RPM system all to hell.

In your particular case, I do suggest that anything to do with Apache is
a heckuva lot easier to deal with if you go get the Apache Toolbox
(www.apachetoolbox.com).

Cheers,
-- 
	Dave Ihnat
	ignatz at dminet.com