Jose is of course quite right about the Dropbox

developers and indeed I have protested to

the Dropbox people about their unreasonable

attitude. However, that does not solve the problem.



I emphasize that this is just an example of a recurrent

problem I have had about the availability of libraries

and support packages under SL. So while I appreciate

Jose's point about stability etc. I'm surprised users at

CERN, Fermilab etc are not pressing on that point more

often (maybe they are, unknown to me) and causing more

effort to bring things up to date.



Malcolm



On 07/01/2019 12:35, Jose Marques wrote:

>> On 7 Jan 2019, at 12:16, MAH Maccallum <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>>

>> For example I cannot currently use Dropbox under SL

>> although I have manually re-partitioned and re-formatted

>> to use ext4 rather than xfs, since Dropbox insists on ext4.

>> The error message tells me I do not have glibc 2.19, and

>> advises I should update to Ubuntu 14.04+ or Fedora 21+

> 

> I would say that DropBox and other software vendors are at fault. They are putting their developer convenience above that of their users. Having said that the desktop Linux market is so small that it does not make commercial sense to do otherwise. The whole point of SL/Centos is that it is stable and doesn't change. This has the side-effect of making the later point releases quite out of date. I believe RHEL8 is in beta so this will reset the clock.

> 

> I can't speak to Ubuntu except to say that 14 is quite old. For Fedora you really want to be on the latest release. We upgraded our labs to Fedora 28 late last year and are already having to update to Fedora 29 due to serious issues in updates to the former release. Even when there are no problems we find that more packages break with time. Previous releases may still be under "support" but they get less developer love than the latest release.

> 

> The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No. SC013532.

>