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Re: Importance of running the latest'n'greatest version



--On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 1:22 PM +0100 Jonas Helgi Palsson <jonas.palsson@bergen.kommune.no> wrote:

Hi

I'm running OpenLDAP on SLES 9 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) and the
version  supplied with it is not the "latest'n'greatest"

ldapsjef:~ # rpm -q openldap2
openldap2-2.2.6-37.26
ldapsjef:~ #


And in the changelog for the rpm the newest entry is dated Nov 10 2004,
where  it says:
- bdb-2.2.18-backport.dif: Backport of the back-bdb from OpenLDAP 2.2.18,
should fix some deadlocks and crashes (Bugzilla #42570)

So what is the common opinion here? Should one stick to the versions
supplied  by the distributor (in this case SuSE), or should one download
the  "latest'n'greatest" from openldap.org and compile it yourself?


I think there are two different things here:

1) The OS level OpenLDAP libraries/command line binaries installation used for various things like PAM, NSS, etc

and

2) The libraries & binaries needed to run a directory service.

I recommend having the two things be entirely separate so that for #2 you can upgrade your service as needed without affecting #1 or having to wait on the distro individuals to update RPM's for you.


On the downside, this approach can take more of your time, as far as having to spend time compiling software. On the upside, you get bug fixes, etc, in more quickly, and if you need to apply patches that the distro doesn't, then you are fine (for example, the transaction related patches for BDB 4.2 & OpenLDAP).

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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