New distro question

[Ben Scott]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:36 AM, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>  Wow.  As glacial as Debian is to release things, I'm fairly certain I
>  can still get updates for ancient releases.

  Nope.  As others have pointed out, the "stable" Debian releases are
maintained for one year after the release of their successor.  After
that, they're EOL'ed.  This usually isn't *that* big a deal, since
Debian's "stable" release cycle is usually once every two to three
years anyway.  But it's not quite like the 7 years RHEL/CentOS gives
you.

  Fedora probably has more in common with Debian "unstable" than
"stable".  Although Fedora does have a defined release cycle and
development roadmap, they're not afraid to make big changes (i.e.,
break stuff) to introduce the latest-and-greatest, or even just to try
something out to see how it flies in the real world.

> Couldn't you just download the src.rpm and rebuild it for your system?

  Sure, assuming the latest-and-greatest still builds with everything
from an old release.  See above about big changes.  By analogy, take a
snapshot of "unstable" from two years ago, and try and get a package
from today's "unstable" to build.  Good luck with that.  ;-)

  Besides, the whole point of having a distro is so you don't have to
build from source.  :)

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:41 AM, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>  Ahh, this reminds me when Sun said, "Sun OS 4.1 is dead".
[seven more updates]

  Man, how *dare* they support their products!  ;-)

  Contrast this with Microsoft.  Exchange 2000 was in the "Extended
Support" phase when DST was changed around last year.  "Extended
Support" means security fixes only.  So at first they said they simply
would not release an updated time zone tables for Exchange unless you
had an Extended Support Contract (tens of thousands of dollars per
year).  A lot of people complained, so they offered a "special deal":
For the low low price of $4000, you could get time zone updates for
their Extended Support products.

  I think I like Sun's way better.

-- Ben