On Sep 11, 2017, at 4:39 AM, Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com> wrote:
Martin Pauly wrote Upstream developers often do provide minimal updates but distributions (especially Debian) fall way behind the releases which leads to insanely large update gaps.
In the interest of being "stable", they ship software with known bugs... and then create work for us by making us support their users. Who are using versions which are 5 years out of date. It's ridiculous.
They try to "fix" that by back-porting patches claiming that these old but patched releases are more "stable" (without giving a clear definition of "stable").
For them, "stable" means: - we shipped something 5 years ago and don't want to change it - we put in only the patches which would embarrass us if they weren't added (mainly security fixes) - we ignore customer requests to fix bugs which affect their systems - we ignore upstream requests to update to a newer version of the software
IMO this approach neither is stable nor secure. Repeating this "stable" claim over and over does not make it become true. And it wastes a lot of time.
Absolutely. Alan DeKok.