[WBEL-devel] ncurses4

[John A. Tamplin]

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, John Hinton wrote:

> I must throw in my vote that I will only use WBEL if it holds as close 
> as possible to RHEL. I'll be running this on mission critical machines 
> and even RedHat had a bad blunder or three. There is simply no way a 
> package can be tested fully and I'm sure RH is going to have a better 
> chance of testing in more combinations than we ever will. Now, I would 
> suggest that 'when' we do find the buggy update from RH, we do what we 
> can as a community to come up with and test a repair. Sometimes RH was 
> terribly slow about fixing what they broke. I'm not meaning this in a 
> bad way, RH has done a fabulous job. It can be tough when faced with 
> 'big security hole here' vs. 'no security hole but your clients have to 
> deal with broken such and such until the fix to the fix comes out'.

I don't see how adding an optional package in any way detracts from the
quality of the rest of it.  I mention ncurses4 specifically since many
binaries compiled on 6.2 will require it, and there are still a number of
commercial applications which fit that description.  Too me, this is no
different than the various compat packages.  (I also have related hacks
for the ctype problem for some 6.2 binaries but I am certainly not
requesting those hacks to be in the distribution -- they may break other
things horribly but they make the Informix ESQL/C compiler functional
among others).

I do realize that every package added becomes more of a maintenance issue, 
and it remains to be seen what level of quality Fedora will have.  I have 
no problem manually applying my own packages and updating them on my three 
machines at home, but I just thought since many of the people running WBEL 
or RHEL will be running commercial applications it would be nice to have.
If that isn't of interest then consider the request retracted.

-- 
John A. Tamplin					jat@jaet.org
770/436-5387 HOME				4116 Manson Ave
                		 		Smyrna, GA  30082-3723