[wellylug] NZ Ubuntu Repository

Jethro Carr jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com
Mon May 21 20:17:25 NZST 2007


On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 19:29 +1200, Jeff Hunt wrote:
> Reading back over everyones' comments, this is like the rest of life.
> It seems to fall into a grey area where there is a proper way to
> proceed and something a little different that works. I will box on
> with the version of Ubuntu that suits me best and do the updates until
> it starts to fall apart and rejoin the rest of you at about 'horrible
> horse'. ;-). 
> Thanks for all the feedback.

hi Jeff,

this is a standard, and desired practise for computer software - think
about this: You use a program which has all the features you need, and
you are happy with it.

In a distribution with a backporting policy, if a security or important
bug fix comes out for the program. the distributors (eg: Ubuntu) will
take the fix, and put the fix into the older version of the program.
This is called backporting.

This works well - you get the updates you need, and you know the program
isn't likely to be broken or changed overnight.

If the distribution didn't have a backporting policy, you might find
after your next update that the software has changed to a newer release.
The changes might be a good thing, or they could cause:
1) Instability problems
2) Removal of features you needed
3) User retraining.
4) New bugs

Users don't like having their computers change themselves. Waking up to
find that your webserver is no longer able to display web pages is never
fun for example. :-)

Most major distributions have a backporting policy, and instead release
new program version in new releases of the distribution - the user can
then make a conscious decision to upgrade to the new release, or
continue using the existing version. Or the user can manually upgrade
that particular program.


Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backporting
http://reallylinux.com/docs/choosinglinux.shtml (see Feature Stability section)

cheers,

-- 
Jethro Carr

www.jethrocarr.com
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog

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