Hi list, I have a question:
Since I am new to gentoo, I don't know how security updates work. I know Debian. In Debian if I have stable installed on a production server, I get regular security fixes, often backported from the current bleeding edge version, where upstream has fixed the bug to the version that Debian stable contains. I have noticed that in gentoo there are many versions of a package that are considered stable. Take glibc as an example, according to http://packages.gentoo.org/search/?sstring=glibc, on x86 there are 8 versions available, all of them stable. I have now two gentoo machines, one is going to be production, the other is used to get me a little bit more familiar with the system. On the playground machine I have 2006.1 installed, glibc 2.4-r3 On the production machine I have 2006.0, switched to hardened profile, and then recompile, there I have glibc 2.3.6-r5 I see now that glibc 2.4-r3 should be upgraded to 2.4-r4 (by the way, where can I check the differences (Changelog) between two gentoo versions (like r3 and r4)?) So my question: If someone finds a bug in glibc that gets corrected, what does the gentoo maintainers do about it? Do they backport the fix in all 8 versions? Or just in some of the versions and mark the not fixed ones ~? Is there some mailinglist (like debian-security-announce) where such security fixes are announced? What is the reason that the hardened profile selects the 2.3.6 version instead of the 2.4? I mean not in glibc's case only, but generally. Does libc 2.4 have troubles with ssp? Cheers, G -- [email protected] mailing list
