Howard Chu wrote:
John Drescher wrote:
Is it just me or do people on this list never support problems
related to
anything but the latest release? Not everyone can immediately
upgrade to the
latest release to fix any issues they have, and they shouldn't have to
either. Previous versions (to an extent) should be supported just
like any
other product.
Its very difficult for any open source software project to support
several year old versions of software that the bugs have been long
since fixed. Even if they backported the fixes the user probably could
not get them in their distro anyways.
Certainly true, but in this case the original poster was already on
the current *release* - i.e., 2.3. But they did not have the current
*patchlevel*, i.e. there are 14 released patchsets since 2.3.27.
Brandon's question is completely off base. The Project has been
actively supporting the 2.3 release for almost 3 years now. For a
volunteer effort that's pretty damn good.
With that last statement it sounds like you think I'm suggesting you
guys don't work hard to fix bugs in old releases which isn't what I
originally stated. I meant that it seemed to me like supporting older
releases from a *troubleshooting* perspective didn't seem to happen much
on this list. Support by backporting patches to old releases and support
by troubleshooting old releases without requiring an upgrade prior to
troubleshooting are 2 different things. It's akin to companies requiring
a supported configuration prior to troubleshooting a problem, even if
the supported configuration is technically and seemingly unrelated to
the problem. Nothing happens until the supported configuration exists on
the customer side. Sometimes it looks like that happens here. Obviously
others disagree. Oh well, just my opinion.
