Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld) [LWN.net]

Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)

Posted Aug 28, 2008 18:08 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)

Seems like an argument against using RH/CentOS (or any big-name distro that makes significant changes to upstream code before distributing it themselves). I'm glad McAllister reported this issue as I suspect this isn't the first time this has happened.

Is there any major distro that only packages unaltered code from the upstream developers? Linux From Scratch comes to mind, and Gentoo and Slackware seem close to this model.

Disclosure: I am a Slackware user, and its philosophy of releasing upstream projects (relatively) unmodified is one of the main reasons I use it.

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Giving credit where it's due

Posted Aug 28, 2008 18:52 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

I'm glad McAllister reported this issue

Correction of sorts: Neil McAllister was reporting for InfoWorld, and it's a decent read, but the original reporter was Vipul Ved Prakash in his blog (linked in McAllister's article). Prakash's article is also an interesting and enlightening article.

Bitten by the Red Hat Perl bug (InfoWorld)

Posted Aug 29, 2008 7:35 UTC (Fri) by mikachu (guest, #5333) [Link]

Gentoo usually applies tons of patches to packages, examples that come to mind are php and xmms. Most packages have the patches in the package system in /usr/portage, but some have so many that they're bundled in patch archives that are on the distfiles mirrors.