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@xxxxxxxxx
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