On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 18:10 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > Rahul Sundaram wrote: > > >>> That depends on the applications themselves. Some of the desktop > >>> applications in particular do get version upgrades too. > >> > >> OK, I suppose it's possible. > > > > It is not merely possible. It happens all the time. > > > > But the mid-life 4.x distro is still > >> providing firefox 1.5.x, subversion 1.1.x, evolution 2.0.x. Are those > >> things you'd want on your desktop much longer? > > > > That depends on what you want out of the desktop. If you want the latest > > and greatest at all times, Fedora will serve that need. If you prefer > > targeted fixes, commercial support etc, RHEL will meet that need better. > > I want something tested but not ancient. Neither disto provides that > except for the first few months after an RHEL cut. But I'm usually > happy with old kernel and server apps (except subversion and > dovecot...). It's generally just the desktop stuff that changes fast > enough to care about. ---- the problem is and will always be the interdependence among the various packages. While it may be convenient to look at things in a vacuum, they simply don't work that way - one package update requires updates on requisite packages which impacts something else down the line. The very thing that makes you rich, makes you poor. On Windows, software is self referenced so that there isn't the package dependencies that you have with Linux. But that's also why each text editor/word processor etc. doesn't have to include a dictionary on Linux and why they all include a dictionary on Windows. Craig
