>On Wed, 04 Nov 1998, Rick Hohensee wrote:
>
>> Red Hat 5.0 was the most broken major Linux distribution in
>> recent years, due to thier bold move to glibc.
>
>Strange, it wasn't broken for me nor many people that I converse with.
>The most broken distribution in recent years is Slackware as it insists
>on shipping buggy, outdated packages with known security holes and doing
>nothing about it.
>
Have you check slackware lately? While it was true that they were shipping
outdated packages and not fixing bugs for a few releases, the past few have
been much better. I usually keep my slackware system updated with the most
recent components and was surprised to find that the new version 3.5 had
newer versions of some packages than those I had on my system. Furthermore,
if you systematically check the changelog.txt file on their FTP site you
will notice that they are consistantly posting updated packages to fix bugs,
close security holes, and updating versions. Furthermore, some of the
packages that they haven't updated have been for good reasons, for example
they have stuck to bash 1.x because some some bash 2.0x imcompatabilities
with ppp chat scripts. And even this can be corrected as well as the choice
of compiler with files located in the contrib directory. (updated bsah, gcc
2.8.1, etc)
>> There are numerous patches
>> for 5.0 in the errata directory on www.redhat.com.
>
>Yes, because Redhat Software spend a lot of time discovering and fixing
>bugs and security holes in the packages they ship, sending the patches
>back to the original authors for inclusion, and releasing updates to their
>customers.
>
>I'm tired of people taking this as meaning Redhat Linux must be severely
>broken, when in fact its the packages they have, which are common to all
>Linux distributions (and sometimes wider Unix flavours), that are broken
>and Redhat (among others) are just doing something about fixing these
>problems. This is a _good_ thing.
>
>Ignoring security alerts and covering up the problems belongs to other
>camps like Slackware and FreeBSD. That kind of childish behaviour has
>no place in a modern computing environment IMO.
>
>My thanks to all people involved in quality Linux distributions such as
>Redhat and Debian that truly care about their community and the quality of
>the software we all use daily.
>
>--
>Matt
>
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