On Fri, 26 Jun 2009, Anatoly Solomin wrote:

> OK, but unfortunately, concerning that Bluetooth stuff I'm right, I'm afraid, 
> because it is in "sl-base", and therefore, presumably is in an acceptable 
> shape, but instead, it miserably fails to work with both: moderately new DELL 
> XPS M1530 and relatively old DELL Precision M90.

Bluetooth works on my Toshiba Portege with SL5.3.

> So the Bluetooth example is a good illustration of my point: do not publish 
> what can't work. Your statement that SL publishes only well-tested things - 
> does not hold here. The "bleeding-edge" Fedora's Bluetooth version works, 
> while "stable" SL's Bluetooth version - does not.

So this is not a good example.

RHEL (and hence SL and Centos) is designed more for servers and 
dedktops and is not particularly appropriate for laptops
which have lots of commodity hardware which changes very quickly,
and which varies a lot from manufacturer to manufacturer.

However the main point is that SL and CentOS are a rebadged versions
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Thus fixing problems by upgrading packages
is something that you would have to ask Red Hat to do. SL and
(though they may be less rigid in this) Centos only copy the versions
released by Red Hat.

Thus having this discussion here is pointless.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[log in to unmask]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna