* David Colburn (kd4e@arrl.net) [040204 17:30]:
Actually the problem is the same chronic one that has long plagued the efforts of Linux to penetrate the non-geek world, poor docs.
Well, that isn't much of an excuse. If Microsoft has such wonderful docs why don't MS users update regularly? It's not the docs. It's either people know or don't care to know how to keep up with things properly.
When the security notice was posted one of two things should have been included, either a pointer to the new sub-versions of Gaim 0.67 and 0.75 (e.g. 0.67a, 0.75a, or whatever the appropriate version number sequence that would be appropriate) that included the fix OR specific instructions that versions of Gaim with the same version number (really dumb) may or may not contain the security fixes and what date-range to look for (and hopefully get one that really contains the security fix).
SUSE only does security fixes..hence the reason for the patched 0.67 pkg. They don't do feature upgrades or upgrades that aren't security related..ie..Yahoo! screwing the public by changing their protocols. The 0.75 pkgs come from www.usr-local-bin.org an James has it spelled out quite nicely on his site. If you want to know the patched version vs what you have then you can do this.. rpm -q gaim This will tell you what version you have. What you pay attention to is the build number not the version of the software of it's the same. For example.. Previous build of 0.75: gaim-0.75-100.SuSE.ulb.1.i586.rpm ^ New build of 0.75: gaim-0.75-100.SuSE.ulb.3.i586.rpm, ^ You'll notice the ^ under the build number. If you did "rpm -q gaim" and compared that to what you got off the ulb site that is what denotes the difference. This was done because it was patched because no 0.76 version exists...so no build of newer software could be made available to anyone.
Absent those instructions it is folly to presume that the majority of non-geek SuSE users would know what to do, especially if they had updated to 0.75 due to the Yahoo failure of 0.67.
If a "non-geek" upgraded to 0.75 and it was a SUSE pkg then they most likely got it from ulb and James gives detailed announcements of new pkgs when he posts them on his site. So for a "non-geek" to be confused that SUSE's bug fix 0.67 was better, newer and faster then 0.75 would be just silly and I'd say they should box their computer up and return it..or something of that nature since lower version numbers do not mean more features in ANY OS environment.
Also, since SuSE was issuing online a replacement version of Gaim 0.67 why not post the 0.75 upgrade with security fix versus wasting time on the outdated v. 0.67? (Who wouldn't update while they were running the security update?)
I explained this in the above paragraphs. SUSE just patches for security reasons and releases the same numbered version that shipped with the distro. It's company policy with all their pkgs as not to break things. They aren't selective in this policy very often at all. -Ben -- Linux User #147972 ---===--- mailto:ben@whack.org -- "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend religious faith."