While I gladly use Mandrake, and have found it to have grown into a very
effective distribution, I do have a slight problem how older distributions
are being more or less ignored in favor of the next big distribution.
What do I mean?
When mdk8 was released, updates and upgrades for mdk7 pretty much stopped
showing up. In terms of similar things happening, while there are always
updates for security updates for mdk8, lots of effort is being expended on
the next (8.1) release, but very little, if next to nothing is being
provided to current 8.0 users.
As an example, Apache and PHP. While current versions are Apache 1.3.20 and
PHP 4.06, there are no applicable 'real' upgrades existing for users that
seek to stay up-to-date. Granted, I can use MandrakeUpdate to install
'cooker' quality updates, but 'cooker' is pre-beta, at best, and not the
most reliable code to place on production servers. In addition, just
selecting 'apache' results in rpminst downloading and installing a plethora
of associated 'dependencies', which, unfortunately, leave the PHP system in
an unusable state (because of the lack of php_mysql in cooker -- brilliant!)
I think it is safe to assume that Apache and associated files (PHP,
mod_gzip, mod_php, mod_perl, etc...) are the most used application for a
Linux system - as such, I believe strongly that Mandrake should expend some
energy in providing such updates to the users of at least two versions back
of their installations.
Not everyone needs or wants, or even can install a brand new distribution
every six months - especially given the historical issues of stability and
quality of first releases by mandrake during the last three such releases.
Providing such critical updates as a service to your existing users should
not cost much additional resources, but can potentially create much
good-will, and much stronger brand loyalty from users who use Mandrake for
production class hosting.
It might be worth evaluating what core apps/servers use (similar to what
Mandrake's 'carbon' apps are), and provide regular updates of these for
systems going back two revisions - in our present state: Mandrake 8.0 and
Mandrake 7.2.
I hope this makes some sense,
Harry
---
http://www.zinkdifferent.com
