New minimum requirement of GTK+2/GLIB for Xarchiver

[Don Christensen]

Giuseppe Torelli wrote:
> On 8/4/06, Stephan Arts <psybsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> A few things, first there is time.
>> Then there might be some things they patched agains gtk+ 2.x, work
>> they need to redo if they upgrade to another version, and this
>> requires time.
> 
> Time is precious I agree but if one decides to create a distribution
> it should carry on the burden it derivates from it. So if a new API
> comes out and the features are worth upgrading I think they should
> upgrade and rebuild all the packages.
> 
> Just my very small two cents.
> 
> Giuseppe

You're missing the viewpoint of corporate networks.  When an IT
department chooses to support a particular OS, they want something
that is stable for as long as possible.  Take a survey of large
companies and ask them how long after Windows XP came out before
they started general deployment of it.  I bet the average is more
than a year, if not closer to three.

RHEL was created for exactly this market.  Even with RHEL 5 out,
RHEL 4 is still going to be in place for some time in many companies.
I know of machines that have been up for over two years.  That means
that until in-service upgrades are available (and reliable), such
machines will be at least two years behind (from a kernel perspective
at the very least).

So you have to be careful about what assumptions you make based on
your sphere of experience.  On my laptop, I like to stay up-to-date
as much as possible, but at work, I expect reliability and consistency,
and I know the IT group could never support the hundreds of different
variations that could exist.  Red Hat has done me a big favor by
enabling the IT group to be comfortable that they have a supported
distro that won't force them to upgrade every six months.  Otherwise,
getting Linux officially supported would be nearly impossible.

-Don

-- 
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc at cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
   "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."