On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, Andries Brouwer wrote:There is a reason why people pay big bucks to Redhat (and others) for a five year contract to back port the bug fixes to the original kernel and software. Barring some huge change I need, I expect to run AS3.0 for four more years for one application, "learning experiences" are not a good thing.
You change some stuff. The bad mistakes are discovered very soon.
Some subtler things or some things that occur only in special
configurations or under special conditions or just with
very low probability may not be noticed until much later.
Some of these subtle bugs are only discovered a year
after the distribution with some particular kernel has
been deployed - at which point the kernel has moved on
so far that the fix the distro does might no longer
apply (even in concept) to the upstream kernel...
This is especially true when you are talking about really
big database servers and bugs that take weeks or months
to trigger.