Re: [tlug] Looking for a distribution to replace Ubuntu

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-11-24 17:40 +0900 (Mon), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Debian provides a decent resolver (liblwres and lwresd) and has done
> so for ages.

Hm. Fair enough. However, I can't say I'm terribly interested in using
it because, for various reasons, I don't want to set up lwresd. (Note
that liblwres does not use the DNS protocol.)

> I imaginge that Ubuntu also provides lwres, though.

It does.

>  > recent releases of binary packages,
> 
> Recent releases of binary packages are almost by definition not
> production-ready.  Who are you kidding?

Well, then perahps we differ on our definition of "production-ready." Or
are the binary packages of authors latest releases generally less stable
for some reason than the authors' releases compiled from source?

But anyway, here are a couple of examples of what I'm looking for. (You
can let me know your term for this, if you like.)

I'd really like a 2.5.x version of pidgin. 2.5.2 has been out for over a
month, and 2.5.0 came out over three months ago. But I could even live
with the five-month old 2.4.3. On Ubuntu, I'm stuck with eight-month-old
pidgin 2.4.1 (and all [or most] of its bugs).

I'd be perfectly happy with trying 2.5.2 and downgrading to 2.5.1 if I
experienced problems.

Last time I was using Debian, some time after PostgreSQL 8.1.1 was
released (after a long and happy 8.0.x set of releases and an 8.1.0
release), Debian's latest package was still a 7.4.x release, which at
that point was deprecated by the PostgreSQL project.

It could well be that I'm missing something here about Linux distro
upgrade procedures, as compared to NetBSD pkgsrc. (The Q3 stable release
of pkgsrc, for example, includes pidgin 2.5.1.) But when it comes to
issues like the PostgreSQL one above, certainly I don't want to be
running on my servers versions deprecated by their vendors and no longer
getting security fixes from them!

cjs
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Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
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