Hi Mike,
You are right about distroes only supplying security updates for their releases.
What you are looking for is backporting: that is rebuilding new major
release software in old environment.
Distroes that has been used in server environment extensivelly have
this. Good example is debian woody with backports.org and apt-get.org.
People would start backporting different programs and their
requirements to provide up to date software on older environment. This
is smart when you have to take care of server installs, that are
running great, the distro provides with security updates, and you just
want certain stuff (like samba, ldap) current.
Redhat is also a good example of repositories being provided for: 7.3
used to be an "enterprise class system" actually the RH Advance Server
is based on it. People provided backports for it for a very good
while. Same is true for RH9, fedoralegacy.org provided updates, and
many repositories existed (like atrpms and dag's repository). There
are also the RH Advanced Server incarnations, such as CentOS.org.
SuSe is however not a good platform for such thing, unless you want to
do it yourself (simply there are only a very few repos for it)
If you want to provide backporting, does not make any different what
you go with, since you will be the one doing it (I have done this for
a client requesting to have a custom VPN and filtering gateway built
on SuSe, so I ended up providing the repo and updates for it. Hey, I
can do anything if I am payed for it). However if you just want
backports without much work, then you need something that had
backports done a lot in the past.
Debian comes to mind... You could also go with CentOS or Fedora, since
those also have backports and are popular. What will make it is how
fammiliar are you with the distro, as backporting sometimes is tricky
(if you do it yourself). I would also suggest something that has apt
and synaptic ported to (RedHat variants have them, even suse, but the
suse repo is slow).
I hope this helps.
Z
On 6/28/05, Mike Branda <mike@wackyworld.tv> wrote:
> So all this dependency talk and latest packages stuff got me thinking.
>
> I can add a SuSE 9.3 ftp installation source to my SuSE 9.2 box and get
> packages that are newer than are in the 9.2 ftp dirs but obviously that
> "breaks away from the distro" per se. Does Debian Mandrake or any other
> distro for that matter do this too?? i.e. create packages up to a
> certain version for a source then when the next stable revision of the
> distro comes, stop updating packages for the first (with the exception
> of security packages of course)?? For example, now that SuSE 9.3 is
> out, as Chuck is dealing with, the only evolution package available in
> the 9.2 ftp path is evolution-2.0.1-6.4. This will not change unless a
> security vulnerability is uncovered for the package. You have to either
> upgrade to 9.3 to get the 2.1.1 version or point your Installation
> source to the updated ftp dir for the latest packages. Which of course
> wants to update a lot of stuff once you do!! When you apt-get in Debian
> (probably sid or whatever the testing ver. is), is it always bleeding
> edge or do they stop doing the latest after a while and move on to the
> next release??
>
>
> Mike Branda Jr.
>
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