Re: Patch management tool

From: Kurt Seifried (bt@seifried.org)
Date: Thu Sep 09 2004 - 21:01:45 EDT


It's called back porting. The reason they do it is because it makes QA a
heck of a lot easier, imagine OpenSSH 3.5 -> 3.6 vs.s. OpenSSH 3.5 ->
OpenSSH 3.5 plus a 50 line patch. Which is less likely to behave in new (an
unexpected) ways? It also makes customers a lot easier, I have a commercial
app that depends on version X of foo, now it may work with version X.1, but
it might not. Personally I'd rather not find out. Back porting is the only
sane alternative if you have several hundred packages that require active
maintenance, QA, and don't want to annoy customers.

Kurt Seifried, kurt@seifried.org
A15B BEE5 B391 B9AD B0EF
AEB0 AD63 0B4E AD56 E574
http://seifried.org/security/

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