-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2009-04-01 at 01:37 -0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:41:30 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
AFAIK, the guaranteed support is for security patches only, the rest is optional.
I appreciate the reply - so please understand my frustration isn't directed at you Carlos.
This policy isn't very helpful to those who haven't upgraded to 11.1. We might just as well be on a continuous upgrade cycle every 8 months (based on the new release schedule).
Just like me, I'm using 11.0 >:-)
I can understand not wanting to "support" software that's 3-4 years old. 11.0 isn't that old. Even Microsoft provides updates beyond security patches only for versions of Windows older than the current release (XP + Vista right now IIRC). The Linux community keeps this mantra of "more eyes on the code", but we can't manage to provide better support for *one* previous release of a distro? C'mon, we're better than that.
The "security patches only" was the old SuSE policy and it hasn't changed much, it is how things are, and there are reasons for it (1). There are exceptions. Big bugs have some chance of being solved, small ones few chances. I don't work at suse, so I don't know which. If you want support, you are pointed to SLES. AFAIK, this problem affects few people in 11.0, most use 11.1; maybe there is some workaround. Marcus said he would have a look at it. Personally, as I'm not affected, I would prefer some other bug be attended to, hopefully some one that affects me! :-P (1) Packages do not get upgraded to another version during a distro life cycle (which is another long standing policy (2)); instead, when there is a problem the solution is backported, and as this requires some work, it is done only if really necessary, which means, security problems only. With some exceptions. This is done to avoid incompatibilities between new or upgraded packages, it add stability to the distro. Upgrading a package can add new problems that are unknown and untested. And it has worked fine for a long time, believe me :-) Other distros may do it different, but this is one of the strengths of suse. (2) Now, contrary to what I said above, you can get packages upgrades via the build service repositories; but these upgrades come "without support", are not included in the "oss" or "non-oss" repos, and will not get updates on the "update" repo. Thus, it could happen that this problem gets a solution on the appropriate repo, instead of an update. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAknS0DoACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VtVwCfbzqoGz0i2Emjt7b9IuTCzTsq +14An3IyhiOVKlVYh9LcbOK40J3LFtjM =+R+E -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org