Re: ssh refuses to install (potato)
Colin Watson said:
> Do you blame him? The version of ssh in potato was basically a hideous
> pile of buggy crap in lots of ways, and the maintainer *cannot* update it
> for anything other than security updates: the upload simply won't be
> accepted. Let the old bugs die. How long security support for potato
> continues is pretty much unrelated to whether maintainers choose to close
> old bugs that are now obsolete.
since I'm not a coder I can't comment on the quality of the code..
but as a system admin of a network of about 60 servers, I will say that
disbanding such software so quickly after a new major release I believe
is debian's biggest drawback to using it in a "production" enviornment.
*I* understand the lack of resources to work on so many trees at once and
perhaps the new maintainers have trouble maintaining old code but it's
hard to explain that to others to promote debian.
It's just worrysome for me which is why I went out and rushed to upgrade
my network to woody despite the network running perfectly fine on
potato, while the upgrade went pretty smooth, I still would have preferred
to keep potato just because I knew it has worked for the past year or 2.
Now I would of migrated to woody eventually, but probably after a hardware
overhaul or complete system replacement(my most preferred way to upgrade).
one of the bugs I filed against the SSH package earlier in the year
(maybe it was late last year), I considered to be CRITICAL, and the
ssh package owner basically said "sorry i won't fix it because it's too
old". This was a long time before woody came out, and the bug broke
40-50% of the systems I installed that version of OpenSSH on(the install
script would stop the SSH server for the upgrade, then perform the
upgrade, which exited with an error and then ssh was unable to start leaving
the machine inaccessable, luckily I caught it early while I was upgrading
machines on the local network before I tried upgrading remote systems).
Again, I do understand the lack of resources debian has to maintain
the old versions, because of that is why I still use & strongly promote
debian where I can(I migrated my current company from entirely redhat to
entirely debian during the 2 years I was there, going from almost nobody
knowing debian, to most people loving it and using it on their own
systems). But it still troubles me. I wish I could work for a company
which had the resources to hire/contract people to maintain the older
versions of debian that are used in-house. Maybe this time around I
will :)
(yes, we've had this discussion on a few other occasions :) )
nate
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