<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;"><br>see inline ...<br><br>Celebrating over 13,000 emails in my Yahoo Inbox !<br><br>--- On <b>Sat, 7/23/11, Bryan J Smith <i><b.j.smith@ieee.org></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><br>From: Bryan J Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org><br>Subject: Re: [CALUG] irc client in Fedora 12<br>To: waltechmail@yahoo.com, "Jeremy Bicha" <jeremy@bicha.net><br>Cc: "calug@unknownlamer.org" <calug@unknownlamer.org><br>Date: Saturday, July 23, 2011, 12:38 AM<br><br><div class="plainMail">From: Walt Smith <<a ymailto="mailto:waltechmail@yahoo.com" href="/mc/compose?to=waltechmail@yahoo.com">waltechmail@yahoo.com</a>><br>> I would disagree that I need to update F12.<br><br>I also noted you talking about issues with repositories. That's because many <br>mirrors have
dropped the older, discontinued releases.<br><br>Of course.<br>But, and here's the but... I don't any reason not to have a reasonably simple<br>page ( from a single link at some level 1-2-3 page) with a list of previous<br>releases. Not having it is more of a marketing decision. Specially on the<br>fedoraproject.org site. And I can't image for the repositories having some subset<br>with older software is a bad thing ?? (Obviously I'm not saying ALL the repose<br>should have ALL the software.. and 2 years old is not THAT old !!! )<br><br><br>> Frankly, I don't see a great deal in Fedora-12 that I didn't see/need<br>> in a desktop back to Fedora 3.<br><br>Then why aren't you running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or a rebuild of it? You <br>are the person it is well designed for. ;)<br><br><br>--<br><br>Probably. But each new release of Fedora gives me something to ponder--<br>whether it
*might* have something of interest. And I lose nothing by sticking<br>with an earlier Fedora. I'm obviously not paying monetary for the distro...( errr. <br>well, I did on several occasions pay for a DVD from someone ... )..<br>So the support I'd get from RHEL is the same as support from Fedora.<br>no difference.<br><br><br>> However, I'm fascinated by the continous betterment without th<br>> "better" part called "changes" for lack of a better description. <br><br>Has nothing to do with it.<br><br>Upstream (community) changes force the updates/upgrades. The Fedora Project <br>merely repackages those. Yes, there are some upstream projects by the Fedora <br>Project itself, at Fedora Hosted, Red Hat, etc..., but many things are outside <br>of Fedora's control, just like any other distro. It's upstream (community).<br><br><br><br>--<br><br>I wasn't blaming Fedora for particular program changes, but Fedora<br>does
select which apps to include in a distro. And they change them often.<br>So I blame upstream for specific app changes and Fedora for selecting the apps.<br><br>edit note:<br>(doing a backspace in a yahoo html compose window doesn't remove the<br>indicator for original message lines. I suppose I COULD edit in text rather<br>than html )<br><br>( yahoo also has a security hole thats been there forever: during login,<br>after you type the username, wait for the page to FINISH D/L before entering<br>the password. If you don't wait, you COULD type<br>the password in the password text box. BUT AFTER the page has completed<br>D/L, it puts the curser back into the username box and the password is then<br>displayed there adjacent to the username in plain text. And shows up in<br>future page accesses due to "completion" persistence. )<br><br>--------<br>It takes a lot of time and money to do sustaining
engineering, backporting <br>security fixes from newer releases to older ones, and ensuring full ABI/API <br>compatibility. That's what Red Hat Enterprise Linux is. Consider it instead of <br>Fedora if you would prefer to stay on the same software for many years.<br><br>That's where the Enterprise Linux model came from. Corporations needing 3, 5, 7 <br>and even now 10 years of fixed software ABI/API compatibility, instead of newer <br>features. It's not cheap to do, but corporations and government is willing to <br>pay or someone to do it.<br><br>-- Bryan<br><br>P.S. The side-effect is that as part of their sustaining engineering efforts is <br>that as they track backports, they are also working with upstream fixes. I.e., <br>people who work on maintaining older Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages are also <br>maintaining Fedora packages and upstream changes. So the money paid to them for <br>sustaining
engineering is, in turn, used to fund upstream development. It's a <br>win-win situation for everyone, and flips the commercial software model.<br><br>I.e., instead of paying for new releases and features, people are paying for <br>sustaining engineering of old ones. The new releases and features are the <br>"bonus" that everyone gets, and no one needs to pay for. Red Hat has not found <br>a sustainable, commercial interest for doing such, even if they crank out a lot <br>of new code (along with others) at FreeDesktop.org, GNOME, etc... that goes into <br>all leading edge distros beyond just Fedora, as a by-product.<br><br>------<br>My bigger problem is one app that simply doesn't work.<br>Never has. It could very well be "my fault". But fault tolerance<br>( errr... user tolerance ) is really not something any linux is known for.<br>When it works, it works well, as long as you don't break it.<br>In my
experience, Windows is generally more fault tolerant.<br>And better at recovery in normal use. <br><br><br>Everything is moving from 2D apps to 3D apps.<br>( and I have not even seen a 3D app personally yet..<br>I just read about it in the posts ).<br>But old user problems are still there.<br>Am I pissed. no.<br>Am I disappointed? yes.<br>Am I still using linux after all these years ? yes.<br>But if someone occasionally doesn't tell the emperor he<br>has no clothes, next years fashions won't mean a whole lot.<br>Specially to a new buyer.<br><br>I'll be looking at F16. I see several changes that are mentioned in<br>news items, but would like to see more discussion here as to pro's and cons<br>of coming changes.<br><br>By the way, from what I've seen, there's a lot of disappointment<br>with Ubuntu using the Unity, even though you can supposedly use a gnome<br>desktop in 11.04 (?). Haven't seen much
discussion here, but there's a lot of<br>verbosity elsewhere.<br><br> <br><br> Walt..............<br><br></div></blockquote></td></tr></table>