On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann
<volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Dienstag 27 September 2011, 13:07:02 schrieb Michael Mol:
>> Except they have drivers which are buggy and require backported fixes.
>
> and that is the reason stable series exist. They are stable and they backport
> fixes. Exclusively.
I hadn't even heard of these until Mark's email 20 minutes ago. It's
useful information. You might have saved us some arguing if you'd
presented it more specific and in an explanatory fashion, rather than
dropping a noun and assuming it was specifically known. I assumed you
meant the kernels maintained by distributions. Obviously, I was wrong,
but Mark's email cleared that up for me.
>
>> The reasons might be that they're using an old software
>> package which was abandoned, and taking ownership of the code isn't
>> always sane. I was actually approached by someone in my area a couple
>> weeks ago who was in just this kind of scenario.
>
> and if the system just works - why touch it at all?
Because, in this case, the hardware, which is unreplaceable, went tits
up. Meaning it no longer works. It can't be replaced, and they're SOL
until they get the software ported forward. Their remaining hardware
of the same vintage had already died on them, and they didn't have any
migration path or hedge set up.
Other reasons--and this is why I *loathe* unnuanced "if it works,
don't touch it" mentalities--include security updates and migration
difficulty in the event of *necessity* of upgrades.
I know someone who's running Ubuntu 7.10 on a server that accepts
incoming, public connections--because they got it working, and didn't
even want to update to the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, because of a "if it just
works, why touch it at all?" mentality. Eventually, they _will_ be
hacked as a consequence, even if it's just from someone scanning the
public IPv4 space with tools looking for vulnerable versions of
software.
The other general class of cases is something Gentoo users should be
able to understand in the abstract; the longer you go without
updating, the more difficult and expensive (in terms of time fixing
incompatibilities from un{tested,supported} version jumps, at the very
least) it becomes when you no longer have a choice.
--
:wq
