Brad Smith came up with a list of reasons why some users might prefer not to use repositories. Another one is that they don't work well with sneakernet, in my experience. There are lots of machines out there with no network access, or with slow network access charged by the minute (think dial-up users with phone bills charged by the minute). In that situation, you really don't want to have to stay online for two hours at a time because someone's made a minor bugfix in X. It's much more practical to get yourself a good firewall, and keep an eye on the security vulnerabilities (so you do install anything that really needs installing). In that situation, you might want to occasionally get a CD mirror of the appropriate updates site: I know that www.linuxemporium.co.uk sell such things, and it's not difficult to do that yourself at a site with good connectivity. Or you might just wait until the next FC release. RPM-based distros tend to make that easy, in my experience. However, the last time I tried Debian, I was still on dial-up, and I found that they were so keen on automatic apt-get that I never found any pointers to a manual download location. "It's great!" they said. "When a new version is released, all that happens is that apt-get takes a bit longer, and you're on the new release without really noticing it!" "'A bit longer'?" I said to myself. "It'll take hours on dial-up! What if I want to get something done and then go out for the evening?" I decided that Debian was only for people on academic or corporate networks (this was a while back, before ADSL became common). Please don't let that happen to Fedora. James. -- E-mail address: james@ | Never meddle in the affairs of Windows NT. It is westexe.demon.co.uk | slow to boot and quick to crash.
