RPM Build Errors

[Phil Mayers]

A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk wrote:
> Hi,
>> A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk wrote:
>>> its just shameful that no distros feel like updating their
>>> default version from 1.1.dinosaur to 2.0.recent
>>   There's a way to fix that: issue 1.1.8 with a few patches, and a large
>> WARNING in the README's, configuration files, man pages, etc. saying "NO
>> LONGER SUPPORTED: UPGRADE!"
>>
>>   After the 1000's email from their annoyed customer asking why they're
>> distributing an old version, they'll upgrade.
> 
> that'd only work if the distros actually took the latest 1.1.x's
> and didnt touch the distributed configs either... eg tonight
> I cam face to face with a defalt 1.1.6  - :-(

I can see two options, neither very pleasant :o(

  1. For the short term distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu), volunteer to be 
a packager. In principle I could do this for Fedora; in practice I have 
no time or patience for the politics involved.

  2. For the long term distributions (e.g. RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu LTS) 
politely ask the distribution to either track no more than 6 months old, 
or if they are unable/unwilling, ask them not to include FreeRadius.

It's GPLed software so of course they're free to refuse the latter; but 
they would probably honour it. Whether it's desirable is another matter

I suppose you could always put a

#define RELEASETIME 12xxxxx

...in a header and an "if gettimeofday() > RELEASETIME: printf(HUGERR)" 
in the source but as you point out, it only solves the problem from this 
point onwards.

Sadly, people want packaged software, they want package updates to not 
cause major upheaval, and distributions fill that niche. Many heavily 
modified and/or legacy packages have notices in the distro packages 
stating this and asking bugs to be filed on the distro bug finder (e.g. 
dhclient on redhat/fedora) but people don't read this, google for the 
package name and come straight here.

Sigh.