I've been bitching about this to Red Hat, but there's nothing but deaf ears over there.

Posted Dec 7, 2006 18:41 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It falls on deaf-ears because it violates a promise Red Hat made to the customer. That promise is that the tools it provides are stable (as much as possible) for 7 years. Changes when they happen occur because there is no other way to maintain a code set (mozilla->seamonkey) or when API/ABI was broken in the first place and needed fixing OR when something was listed as being changed in the future (additions to the kernel, glibc, and other core utilities but those changes only occur for the first 24-30 months of the product lifetime.)

Now there are problems with this in the case that some tools people want will 'bit-rot' but for other customers they will want that tool stuck for 7 years even if it means that all the new neat stuff aren't there. The problem is that the majority of the money for people wanting to stay with a release over 36 months are in the second category (don't touch anything). The people who want a stable OS but the latest toys usually upgrade to the next release by 36 months (RHEL_4 in this case).

In your case, this doesnt work as you are sticking with RHEL-3 but need a newer version of spam-assassin.. and so RHEL is not going to be the 'sole' product for you. You could either find another distribution, or you could find a consultant company that has alternatives of needed packages or you could do it yourself.