Re: lynx-dev bug report

[David Woolley]

> 2.8.2dev.11? Why include devel versions in a productive distribution? AFAIK,

I think Red Hat are partly serving a market that is very fashion conscious
and always wants the latest, but often does not really understand the
difference between development and release versions (the maintainers of
the DOS port of Lynx don't help here by always pointing people to 
development versions on this list).  Microsoft have also blurred the
distinction with their beta release (i.e. real releases with more bugs
than normal and a don't blame me sticker).

Red Hat further suffers from the fact that a number of contributed package
developers seem to want to be the first to get each new version of a
piece of software into an RPM.

The squid list got a question yesterday about an RPM of a development
version that was about 4 months out of date, even though the list charter
bans questions about development versions and there were much more recent
release versions.

One partial solution for centrally coordinated development is for the 
project to issue official RPMs, but squid is not centralised and it would
be impossible to distinguish between an official RPM submitter and any
other contrib RPM submitter.

As discussed recently on the gnu.misc.discuss list, the GPL means that
there is no legal sanction that you can use against the production of
development quality RPMs; you have to rely on goodwill.  To a large 
extent that goodwill seems to exist on Debian, but Red Hat seem to be
more of a  cataloger than an editor.