On Wed Sep 03, 2003 at 02:22:04PM +0100, John Allen wrote: > > I'm not sure what benefit having releases like this would give. Either > > you're patched or not. I can't think of any company that could devote > > resources to a new release on the schedule that a point-point release > > demands. Especially not any Linux distro company, who are all pulling a > > balancing act just maintaining a six-month cycle (or less). > > I'm not talking about a new release; more like a bundled up set of patches. > Its easy to download patches from the net on a daily basis, but you'd be > surprised how many people cannot do this, they simply don't have fact enough > net access.
The only way this would be feasible, which is also a point I dislike about OS X, is if we sat on updates for a bit and released a combined set of updates except for the most absolutely critical things. Ie. we could put out a 9.2.1 in November that has all of the bugfixes, security fixes, etc. in a giant tarball, make urpmi download the tarball, do the install, bla bla, and carry on. That would make sense if we were to take such an approach. The problem with this approach is the lack of immediate fixes. Would you really want to sit on a major problem in your favourite email client for a month just because we don't have enough "stuff" to make a nice little 9.2.1 package? I sure wouldn't. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing Apple does and it's absolutely beyond me. For feature enhancements, sure. But those rarely go into updates... updates are for bugfixes and security updates more often than not. And I, personally, like to get those out the door as soon as possible and I believe the general community appreciates the fact that we don't sit on it for a marketting gimick. My (final) $0.02 on the subject. It's kind of useless to debate, however, because I sincerely doubt it will happen. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from changing the release number in /etc/mandrake-release every month or so if you feel like you've download enough updates to warrant an sub-dot release on your own system. =) -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ Online Security Resource Book; http://linsec.ca/ "lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import" {FE6F2AFD : 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD}
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