If bugfixes were consistently backported, and support was provided for older versions running on newer OS's, then this wouldn't be as much of a problem. But we orphan our code afte one version cycle; 7.0.x is completely unsupported, for instance, while even 7.2.x is virtually unsupported. My hat's off to Red Hat for backporting the buffer overflow fixes to all their supported versions; we certainly wouldn't have don it. And 7.3.x will be unsupported once we get past 7.4 release, right? So in order to get critical bug fixes, users must upgrade to a later codebase, and go through the pain of upgrading their data.
Command Prompt is supporting the 7.3 series until 2005 and that includes backporting certain features and bug fixes. The reality is that most (with the exception of the Linux kernel and maybe Apache) open source projects don't support back releases. That is the point of commercial releases such as RedHat DB and Mammoth. We will support the the older releases for some time.
If you want to have continued support for an older rev, purchase a commercial version. I am not trying to push my product here, but frankly I think your argument is weak. There is zero reason for the community to support previous version of code. Maybe until 7.4 reaches 7.4.1 or something but longer? Why? The community should be focusing on generating new, better, faster, cleaner code.
That is just my .02.
Joshua Drake
K, looking back through that it almost sounds like a ramble ... hopefully
you understand what I'm asking ...
*I* should complain about a ramble? :-)
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