Alfred von Campe wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2009, at 15:49, Ned Slider wrote:
>
>> I've rebuilt most of the upstream fastrack packages for CentOS-5.2
>> here:
>>
>> http://centos.toracat.org/ned/CentOS-5/testing/
>>
>> Usual disclaimers apply - provided "as is", and use at your own risk.
>
> Great, I grabbed a copy but will probably not install/test it until
> next week.
>
>> My (limited) understanding of upstream's Fastrack channel is that
>> these
>> bug fixes will be released into the next point update release (e.g,
>> RHEL-5.3).
>
> Yeah, that was my impression as well. I wonder how Red Hat decides
> what goes into updates and what goes into FasTrack.
>
> In any event, thanks for making this available, Ned.
>
You're welcome. I also understand that Scientific Linux also builds the
fastrack packages so that's another potential source for these updates.
My understanding is that these are mostly trivial bug fix updates from
reading the errata (some such as for the ORBit2 package are almost
comical if you examine the included patch). My guess is that upstream
would not wish to increase the burden on sysadmins with trivial updates
when in many production environments all updates must be vetted before
they can be deployed. Upstream has a habit of holding back less critical
updates until a point they can be conveniently integrated into a single
release. However, that doesn't always happen with Fastrack fixes. The
recent xterm security update is a case in point - xterm packages exists
in Fastrack containing a bug fix update and when a recent security issue
was fixed, upstream chose not to take the opportunity to also include
the fastrack fix but rather released separate security fixes to both
updates and fastrack channels.
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