Whither Fedora Legacy? [LWN.net]

Whither Fedora Legacy?

Posted Jan 20, 2005 14:57 UTC (Thu) by garloff (subscriber, #319)
Parent article: Whither Fedora Legacy?

Fixing a security problem by just updating to a newer version often is
the easiest and quickest that a distributor can do.
And some users will appreciate to get version updates this way.

However, there are serious downsides:
* The newer version may behave differently in subtle or less subtle
ways.
* If the package contains libraries ... that other packages depend on,
updating to newer versions may introduce breakage at various hard-to
determine places.

This means that these version updates will worsen the quality and
consistency of the distribution over time. But then, a year of security
updates is not much anyways.
If you plan to keep a distro running for a while, you may well want to
chose a distro that does avoid version updates as security patches.

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Fix by version upgrade

Posted Jan 21, 2005 0:02 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Plus, the new version may have bugs, including security ones.

Version upgrades of major pieces of my system, such as the kernel, are too destabilizing for me, so when I need a security fix, I try to find just the security fix and apply it myself. But I've had a rather hard time finding them, particularly for the Linux kernel. There are copious web sites reporting security flaws and pointing you to a version upgrade that fixes it, but they don't usually have the actual fix.

If anyone knows where one can find individual kernel security fixes, please post.