On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 09:32:14AM +0200, Paul Bijnens wrote:
> Kevin Passey wrote:
> >
> >Is there a way of keeping Amanda up to date thru RHN.
> 
> It's up to RH to follow the development of Amanda.
> They don't seem to follow it "on the bleeding" edge.
> 
> Some reasons I can think of:
> - they don't have many users of amanda
> - there is no Amanda specialist at RH
> - Amanda has too many parameters built in while compiling,
>   making a general rpm distributed version not very elegant.
>   Even on this list, most people say: compile it yourself, don't
>   use the rpms.
> - There is no rpm made by the Amanda developers, ready for RH to
>   base itself on.

I'm the Red Hat Amanda maintainer.  There's only one of me, and I
maintain too many packages to spend much time on any one of them.
I've got a list of features I'd like to add to Amanda if I ever get a
chance, but time to do it hasn't happened yet.

Amanda 2.4.4 came out after the package freeze for Red Hat Linux 9.  I
was hoping to include it, but the schedules just didn't work out that
way.  2.4.4 will be included in upcoming betas and the next version of
Red Hat Linux.

As a general policy, we only make errata (updated packages) for
security holes and major bugfixes.  On the one hand, we just don't
have the people to do it, and on the other, we don't want to go around
accidentally breaking our customers' systems by making them upgrade to
potentially incompatable newer versions of a package.  That's why Red
Hat Linux 7.1 still uses Samba 2.0.10 (to which I recently had to
backport a number of security fixes), for instance.

So if you use Red Hat Linux, and you want Amanda 2.4.4, there are
several ways to get it:

1: Wait for the next released version or beta.  (If you're really
brave, you can try taking the amanda*2.4.4* rpms and try installing
them on your older box.  This is not supported, and probably won't
work.  If it breaks you get to keep both halves, etc. . .)

2: Compile it yourself.  This is also the best option if you need to
configure it differently than the defaults I chose.  If you want me
to change the defaults for everyone, submit an enhancement request at
bugzilla.redhat.com.

3: Find a security hole in Amanda 2.4.3 that's fixed in 2.4.4 and
doesn't have an easily backported fix.

4: Talk to sales AT redhat DOT com.  Many people forget this option.

                        -- JF