On 9/2/2011 3:49 PM, Wietse Venema wrote:
Michael B Allen:
BTW, Postfix 2.3 was developed in 2005, released in 2006, and support
was terminated in 2009.
This is off-topic but you may know that CentOS (which is RedHat
repackaged without the branding) backports all fixes. Meaning an issue
identified in 2.6 would be addressed as a patch in their 2.3 package
(if necessary). So they do not solely rely on upstream support. They
are going for stability and longevity. That is why I use CentOS /
RedHat and I suspect that is why you continue to get this question on
the list. Unlike most Linux distributions, they continue to update
packages for 4 years or so because that is about how long it takes for
hardware to become obsolete or breakdown. Some very popular
distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora almost always stop updating after
only a year or so. This is one reason why I believe that Linux is not
going to gain market share over other operating systems.
I already provide routine updates for four stable Postfix releases,
so there really is no need to fall behind so much like RedHat does.
Red Hat is a commercial distro. They will always do things differently,
things that seem strange and sometimes simply stupid to the rest of us.
Which is one of the many reasons I don't use a commercial distro. Red
Hat cherry picks patches from up and down the kernel source tree and
backports them, all the way from 2.6.30 to 3.1 rc1. Many such kernel
patches are contributed by RH. I don't know if they do this with
applications, but it stands to reason that they would, given what they
do with the kernel.
--
Stan
