Advance notice - H-root address change on December 1, 2015

Tue Nov 17 00:55:31 UTC 2015

This action by red hat is nice from a stability perspective but infuriates many standards derived folks like ISC/BIND and NTP amongst others as a version number means something to them. 

This dialogue is typically broken from both sides as expectations are different and bug reports get lost between the OS packaging and the supplier packaging. Sometimes this is good other times it can be quite bad. 

I would prefer to see fewer variants and better bug fixes across the board but the enterprise side often want a specific version number and expect fixes that the upstream maintainers don't want to keep the same version numbering for "that fix" or add a stealth feature and red hat may not want to pick it up... 

Not saying who is right or wrong but these views sometimes drive the intractable situation where 4.2.6 is shipped for NTP from red hat (as example) but it is EOL from the NTP.org folks. 

The good news is most people don't need all 13 hints, or more when you consider them dual stacked like all new DNS servers are :-)

Either way it's confusing to everyone involved and why I generally track fedora myself. 

Jared Mauch

> On Nov 16, 2015, at 7:16 PM, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> In message <A94D98ED-538E-4B0E-B91D-AD63D485DB0F at lboro.ac.uk>, Alan Buxey writes:
>> No.  CentOS follows RedHat.  They backport fixes to older versions rather
>> than put the new version out.  It appears that have aversion to new
>> feature and just want to put the fixes onto the older versions.  So that
>> 9.9.4 probably has 60% of the changes that the diff of 9.9.4 has to 9.9.8
>> . This action confuses most.
>> 
>> alan
> 
> The point of putting out maintainence releases is to fix bugs in
> the existing code not to introduce features.  We leave features to
> the .0 releases.  The [func] below are bug fixes / security fixes.
> 
> Even with 60% of the changes one is missing a huge number of bug
> fixes.