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

[Harlan Stenn <stenn () nwtime org>]

On 11/16/15 4:55 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:
> 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.

Red Hat has known for YEARS that we only have the resources to support
one stable code branch, and that if they want support for older versions
we can offer that at cost.

Nobody has ever approached us about support for older releases of NTP.

The folks who scream the loudest about our not supporting older releases
are the folks who charge their customers money for support.  These same
companies do nothing to support us.

Anybody can see the list of companies that support NTP at:

 http://nwtime.org/current-members-donors/

The free software companies listed there do not give us any money.

> > On Nov 16, 2015, at 7:16 PM, Mark Andrews <marka () isc org> wrote:
> >
> > 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.

In NTP's case, we fixed over 1100 things between 4.2.6 and 4.2.8.

Skippy
(Harlan'e evil twin brother)