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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
> I don't mean to imply dishonest
Thanks, I appreciate the clarification... but urge you to read the copied-n-pasted definition above; "disingenuous" is a pretty specific word.
> On the other hand, if you pop into an IRC
> channel or mailing list for support and ask the
> residents for help with something, the first
> thing you are going to be directed to do is get
> current in most cases.
No arguments here! But which channel are you popping into? If it's a channel maintained by the developers of the package in question, of *course* they're going to want you to install their most current version. If it's #debian or #ubuntu, more frequently they're going to want you to apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.
> I don't see any repo making noticeable
> changes to OSS core packages in the name
> of QA.
Sorta depends on what you call "QA", I guess - repos very frequently backport security fixes to older versions of software, and similarly they very frequently make integration-related changes. The distro maintainer also has to properly set dependencies and conflicts, and make patches to account for locations of required files, et cetera.
One question you might want to ask yourself is *why* do the distributions backport security fixes to older versions, rather than just compiling the newest version and tossing it into the repos willy-nilly? It's clearly a lot less work just to compile whatever's on the vendor's website than it is to actually go through and patch older versions... so why don't they do exactly that?
The answer is *to provide a more stable environment* for the people who are using the distros. When you keep introducing new version after new version straight from the vendor (author if you prefer), you're also more likely to introduce new bugs, and to break functionality that software using the package as a dependency might rely on. All of which increases the cost of maintenance and the frustration factor for the mythical "typical user".
This gets pretty frustrating when you are in the mindset "well I want to do the newest possible thing with the newest possible things and I JUST WANT EVERYTHING NEW!", but on the other hand, when you're in the position of maintaining a stable environment yourself - whether it be your family's small network or your business' revenue-producing server farm - you quickly see the benefit of a more organized and predictable release schedule that you can plan around.
BTW, the PostgreSQL versions available on Debian and Ubuntu are 8.4 and 9.1 - 9.1 *does* assume you use the backports repo, of course.