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upgrade to the currently supported distribution before Redhat, or whomever your vendor may be, decides your distro is obsolete.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@xxxxxxxxxx -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
