"M. Fioretti" wrote: > Sorry, I didn't translate him right. What he actually said is "older > than those shipped with Mdk 9.1". So, with respect to Galeon and > Mozilla, one should check when Mdk 9.1 came out, compare that with > RH9, and then figure out, assuming it's possible, if the result means > that one distro is faster or less careful than the other when it > comes to QA and packaging. Exactly. Mandrake compiles a distribution for desktops, so they can react rather quickly. Red Hat tries to make a stable and secure distribution for servers and business desktops. Having the latest versions scares a lot of managers, I know that from personal experience. > We could just as well drop discussion on those two packages. I > reported them for completeness, but was more interested in what he > said about PHP/PostGresql/apache, as those are server side things a > bit more critical, in general. If you use a new version of Apache, you have to recompile all the modules as well ==> *lots* of testing! Same goes for PostgreSQL, there it's the interface modules for programming languages like Perl, C/C++, Python, Ruby, PHP... This together with a new compiler - you can imagine the testing horror! Furthermore, Red Hat version numbers are not always what they seem to be: Often Red Hat staff backports patches and new features to their choosen version instead of upgrading, because this often causes less risk. And the expected risk is a critical thing when trying to sell software to managers. Why do you think Netscape still develops new versions of the 4.x browser? Because there a lot of companies out there which are scared by the thought to upgrade. It's stupid, but when have managers have ever listened to their techs? And the managers decide. Red Hat has companies as main focus, so they have to act accordingly. Best regards, Martin Stricker -- Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/ Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/ Red Hat Linux 7.3, 8.0, 9 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/ Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/
